Sun Yuan and his co-conspirator Peng Yu share a taste for camo vests, snowboard pants and military boots. Their work has consistently pushed at the bounds of performance sculpture, posing aggressive thought experiments that often delve into cruel ironies: dogs at each others’ throats, ritualized firearm handling, or angels fallen from biennial grace. Their abdundant use of the simulacra of life—taxidermy, resin models, or portraits—recalls the work of canonical iconoclasts like Maurizio Cattelan, though their work does not so much represent life as practice it—questions of illusion are simply inappropriate to their work, which doggedly pursues the possibility of transcendence. Sun Yuan and I met in the studio he shares with Peng Yu and lives in, in a converted factory near 798 in Northeast Beijing.</p>