I found this piece by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu at the Saatchi gallery and was really interested in their approach to the elderly figure. They have positioned them in electric wheelchairs which results in them all moving slowly around the gallery space in a completely random fashion, even crashing into walls and each other. Most of their work is concerned with 'death and the human condition' a similar theme to my work. I feel that their depiction of these people are quite contrived, I don't think that each figure has their own personality and in my opinion they look like they have been imagined by the artists rather than based on real people. I think that this makes the piece work well all together, with all the figures presented in the space as a group, however individually I don't feel that the sculptures have much personality. The quality of life is given to the figures by the physical movement of the pieces, not by the pieces themselves and this is definitely something I want to be able to convey through my drawings alone. I also feel that the pieces seem to be quite like caricatures - they are so wrinkled and decrepit that it makes them almost seem unreal. Also the uniforms that they are dressed in seem to represent more than the figures themselves.
The one aspect of this piece that I do like is the way that the figures seem to be asleep, or just completely exhausted. Their positioning and poses completely epitomise the elderly form.
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