Taken for a ride

Every now and then you see a work that encapsulates the times you live in. This installation, Old People’s Home by the Chinese team Sun Yuan and Pen Yu, did just that. In the middle of an exhibition of contemporary Chinese art we rounded a corner to see what appeared to be 13 old men in motorized wheel chairs erratically moving around the space, narrowly avoiding collisions and skittering along the walls. The figures were life-like in a corpsey sort of way and the effect both shocking and thrilling. A couple of nights before we had watched around 13 men in suits on tv telling the world they had agreed to bail out erratic hedge funders and mortgage gamblers. Only now do we realize they should have been seated in motorized wheel chairs.
Image: Sun Yuan and Pen Yu's installation Old People’s Home