Picture bumper cars, except instead of kids and parents and emotionally stunted adults you have hyper-geriatric prominent global figures, and instead of bumper cars they’re on wheelchairs. At inchingly slow speeds, they roll. When they collide there is a small budge from the bump’s force and no reactions from the riding figures who appear unconscious, asleep, possibly dead.

In ‘Old People’s Home,’ an ambitious installation from Sun Yuan and Peng Yu first displayed in 2007, the only people awake in the room are the audience. On a human level, it’s somewhat concerning to see the uncharted rolling, the periodic collisions. Imagine if there were live nuclear warheads strapped to the armrests.

The depictions of world leaders in Old People’s Home are certainly hyperbolic (or at least they were in 2007), but one doesn’t have to look far to find a nuclear-empowered world leader of dubious cognitive ability.

While Sun and Peng both studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing during years of relative artistic freedom, they also experienced the restrictive artistic environment of the Cultural Revolution and Mao years. The duo therefore has first-hand experience with the impact leadership can have, not just at the abstract level of geopolitics, but in the immediate and personal life of the artist.

Beyond the element of pure (in)capacity, Old People’s Home also brings to mind the asymmetrical incentives of the young and the old. There is danger in a group of individuals running the world without the burden of living much longer in it, the work suggests. The dead have nothing to lose. The very old have less to lose than the young. Many global conflicts are designed and fueled by a gerontocracy whose motivations include personal complexies, the gleam of prestige, and senile delusions, but not a belief that they will face the future they herald.

Sun and Peng’s work often uses mechanization to create disturbing imagery. Many may be familiar with clips of a robotic arm drawing blood toward itself with a squeegee in a glass box (Can’t Help Myself), or a chained high pressure fire hose writhing against the bars of a metal cage under the force of its periodic hydroeruptions (Freedom).

The hyperreal is essential to their practice as well. Well-known pieces such as their 2008 “Angel'' make the skin crawl with, incidentally, very real looking skin. They have even used live organisms in their work, as was the case with Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other, which involved dogs strapped to treadmills. Predictably, PETA had two cents on this matter, and the installation has been scrubbed from the Guggenheim digital archive.

Old People’s Home didn’t escape critique of its correctness. One thread of offense posited that the installation was unacceptably and unnecessarily ableist. A little less poignant were the ageist complaints. By the letter of this particular -ists invoked, it’s hard to argue that the work isn’t what these offended parties say it is.

Easier to argue is that this is the point, or that this shouldn’t matter. Controversy is part and parcel of Sun and Peng’s work. The aim is to disturb, jar, discomfit. There is collateral; people get offended and dogs may be permanently traumatized. There is also, of course, collateral to the issues their work attempts to interrogate. A senile finger does not fall lightly to the red button labeled NUKE.

On a more general level, indignant viewer responses like the ones to Old People’s Home lead us to question whether art should have to justify its existence by proving it brings more good into the world than the harm it causes. Many regimes have answered yes. Sun and Peng grew up in one.

Disturbing images are a dime a dozen. Compelling ones are few and far between. This will always be true. And even if an artist should fail to reach the latter and fall prey to being merely the former, the attempt (if it is done in good faith) is admirable.