Fallen Angel: the art world’s very first ‘viral’ internet moment
In 2015, news outlets started reporting the unthinkable. “Breaking News”, they’d announce. “An angel with no feathers has fallen to Earth”. Most of the public imagined it would be a winged woman, beautiful and cherub-like – as most angels are depicted – who had gracefully tumbled from the sky in some quasi-religious miracle. In reality, this angel was an art installation created by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu and was actually quite grotesque.
In the Bible, angels are typically male, but over the course of art history, they were depicted more often than not as female. Even in pagan religions, goddesses had wings, and this idea of the celestial feminine seems to have stuck. Their traits are entwined with feminine ideals, too; they guide and watch and care from above, almost like mothers. Yuan and Peng seized on this imagery with their piece, Angel.
Initially created in 2008, the fibreglass sculpture was an eerily realistic old woman, complete with chicken-like, featherless wings. She was an aged angel. With white skin, wrinkles, and sunspots, her appearance was touched by human kindness. Without the horrifying chickenlike wings, she’d look like a sweet grandmother slumped over on the ground. It’s interesting that as well as robbing their angel of the very thing that makes it an angel, they chose to make her old.
On their website, a statement read: “The angel, a transcendent being, has become powerless, unable to carry out God’s will, or to help those who believe in its existence”. While this could read to some like religious pessimism, the lifelike quality of the sculpture suggests something else – that the older, wiser generation of women left on Earth are the real saints we should look to in times of crisis.
Still, that line of thought didn’t translate when hoards of onlookers came across Angel when it appeared in Beijing. The media everywhere, from London to areas of America, reported that this angel had been found in their countries, and it was almost as if people wanted it to be real. That year, there were mass shootings, terrorist attacks, and a worsening refugee crisis. These events make that sense of that desperation to believe it, as well as Yuan and Peng’s insistence that angels had abandoned us.
The Chinese art duo spent a career shocking people with their work, and Angel was just another in a long line of freakish sights they’d produced, using unconventional materials that ranged from the weird to the horrific, the likes of their hyperrealist sculptures to live dogs and baby cadavers. They’ve said they both look to highlight “the conceptual world beyond its material existence and hope their work can break the bonds of social taboos”.
Art has cycled through various viral moments, like Damien Hirst’s shark piece and Tracey Emin’s bed, but Angel was one of the first to shock people outside of the confines of gallery walls.
