Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu are an artist duo of great prominence born in the 70s. Free and unrestrained in spirit, their works take various forms. "Knocking people's socks off" sums up many viewers' impression of their works. However, the astonishment lies not in the apparent visual tension or the intrinsic symbolic meanings, but the spine-tingling profoundness uncovered after a deeper understanding of the nature of a person, animal or object. They spotlight the contradictions of death, competitions, conflicts, imbalance, and human nature, challenging people's inertial thinking and underlying taboos with their creations.

Created in 2003, Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other is a video that combines installation, behavior, and interaction. They put eight pit bulls trained to be highly ferocious and pair them up into four groups on specially designed dog treadmills. Once the curtains separating the face-to-face pit bulls are lifted, they bolt and bark fiercely to try and get to the other. Constrained by the leash, these dogs can only "fight" in a “virtual” arena until they are totally exhausted. The artists use treadmills and chains to change the rules of the melee fighting game for the pit bulls. Unchanged is the nature of violent animosity, which is simply hidden away but can't be eradicated. This gets people thinking: in today's highly competitive world, have we been manipulated by those in power to become blind, belligerent fighting dogs in the workplace, chasing our imaginary enemies all day long until we are not breathing? Meanwhile in the age of Internet, when people are confronted with controversy, we fail to communicate at all but quickly split into two extremes—left or right, unification or independence, conservative or liberal—screaming and going at each other's throats without coming close to any consensus!