Curator: Josef Ng

Background
"...true freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline." - Mortimer J. Adler

The nature of freedom lies within the realities of our time. Our sense of liberation or what’s left of it depends on our perspectives and on how or who gets to experience it. Today, freedom is a flashpoint: One person’s deliverance may be another’s chaos. Frequently, the act of freedom may be misleading. You think you are free but this delusional view of a nature, a sign we hear and see everyday in our mass media, socio-political protocols and aesthetics milieu, is altered and manifested through cross-pollination with culture and technology.

FREEDOM, as rendered by Sun Yuan & Peng Yu in their latest installation project, considers and creates a visual construction that both engages and diverts meaning. The installation poetically re-interprets common materials in order to engage with notions of time and space, abstraction and representation, landscape and composition.

For their first major solo exposition in their own country, these Beijing-based artists have rigorously concentrated on the architectural aspect of the gallery and tools that it should encompass, to contain within it the multiple and symbolic relationships between the exhibition space and the work.

The exhibition is arranged along two fixed routes where viewings are permitted whilst exposing the audience to the overwhelming industrial ambience. The artists convey and reflect a dimension of freedom that irrupts from certain spatial collisions that occur in urban developments, the politicization of civic spaces and the fluctuations of capitalism.

Working with precision in their method of display, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu lure the viewers towards the themes of inhabitability, absence and presence, and liberation where the static and the vigorous, the visible and the hidden are interconnected in a single network of visual cross-reference. Greatly delineated in this project is the duo’s daringly innovative testing and construction of circuitous protocols, engineering procedures, and a high degree of labor intensivity so as to orchestra a single elegant experiential work that simultaneously directs attention and deflects interpretation, smuggling in neglected core behaviours, calculations and narratives. This will be a beauty or a monster, depending on your perception.

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu are Beijing-based contemporary conceptual artists who are known for their controversial approach to installations and interactive projects. Working collaboratively, they won the Contemporary Chinese Art Award in 2001 and were the representative artists at the Chinese Pavilion in the 51st Venice Biennale. They are also known to take on unusual materials like human fat tissue, live animals and even baby cadavers. Their artwork deals with issues of life, death and the human condition in surreal, and sometimes confrontational, ways. Their works have been collected internationally, including the acquisition by the Saatchi Gallery of Old Folks Home, which features thirteen life-like sculptures sitting in their mechanized wheelchairs.