Go Figure!

Yasser Arafat just crashed into Fidel Castro again. Ayatollah Khomeini is threatening to collide with Karl Marx. Or maybe that's Stalin. Who knows. But all this diplomatic chaos is not without reason; it's for an artwork called Old People's Home, an interactive installation created by husband-and-wife duo Sun Yuan and Peng Yu that's the centrepiece of Go Figure! Contemporary Chinese Portraiture at Sydney's Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation. It sees 13 incredibly lifelike sculptures of elderly political leaders of vague – and at times not so vague – identity sat in electronic wheelchairs that automatically send them careening about the room, spinning, charging and bumping into one another like some odd nursing-home version of bumper cars. It's all terribly amusing.

“I always envisaged it as a living sculpture,” Sun Yuan explained through a translator. “Audience interaction is very much part of the work.” And he's not kidding. Even at the media preview, several visitors need to be rescued from the path of a stampeding wheelchair-bound world leader. The fascinating piece is the result of around three years of painstaking planning, research and construction, and is a comment on the fact that we, all of us, have the same fate in store. No matter how powerful we might be, eventually, our bodies break down; we lose our control. We get old.

Among other pieces, the show also includes a sculpture by Ai Weiwei, a brilliant portrait of Chairman Mao by Shen Shaomin and video work by Zhou Tao and Wang Jianwei. It's another fantastic show from a gallery that, despite its size, has long punched above its weight.