Robotics art by Chinese Artists #art #contemporaryart #installationart #photography

Sun Yuan & Peng Yu - Can't Help Myself

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu are often seen as two of China’s most controversial artists and are known for their extreme installations and contemporary conceptual artworks. Most of their artworks deal with matters relating to death, perception, and the human condition and are often considered to be very confrontational and provocative. The artists’ use of unconventional media, such as machinery, human fat tissue, and even baby cadavers, is intriguing and fascinating to many.

Popular works include the installation Old People’s Home (2008), in which 13 hyper-realistic sculptures of elderly world leaders continuously wander through a small room in electric wheelchairs (Archer, 2019), and the controversial installation Dogs Which Cannot Touch Each Other (2003), where eight dogs are strapped onto treadmills, able only to run forward (Baecker, 2017).

Just like Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s other works, Can’t Help Myself is meant to be thought-provoking and confrontational. According to Xiaoyu Weng, associate curator of the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation at the Guggenheim Museum, the artwork touches upon many current issues that are urgent in a global context, not only with its robotic characteristic/ materiality but also with its conceptual, socio-political messages.". With the robot, the artists were able to offer a critical reflection on modern-day issues, such as migration, surveillance, authoritarianism, and even on technology itself.

It can be argued that the robot of Can’t Help Myself confronts us with issues relating to surveillance, border policing, and authoritarianism. According to Tara McCullough (2020), the work "is intended to represent governments’ attempts at using machinery and modern advances in technology in order to protect themselves and their countries".

Artist : Sun Yuan & Peng Yu
Piece : Can't help myself

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