by Nicole Zihua Zhang (張梓華)
With a hammer in each hand, he struck them against each other until one was damaged; then the other undamaged one was smashed by another hammer, which was repeated until there was only one hammer left. He first struck 161 hammers in Beijing in 2012 under the title Deathless Love and then travelled to the UK, Germany, South Korea, and Australia to smash different numbers of hammers. Deathless Love evolved from his first performance artwork, Two Stones. In 2018, the artist began to prepare for an experimental art film, One Man’s War, based on Deathless Love. One Man’s War adopts a full-time method and screen switch in real time, “live streaming” the scene atmosphere of 301 hammers striking each other clearly in an all-around way. “This is a piece of work I want to focus on for the rest of my life,” Li said, “Imagine that when I’m 80 years old, I’m still striking hammer. Every time I strike a hammer, it will be very hard with my hands trembling. But it must be fantastic to write a long autobiography about the state of life.”
Paradox and Freedom
This allegorical work, like Li Binyuan’s self-portrait, condenses his art practice of more than 10 years. When he entered the Central Academy of Fine Arts, he could not stay in the studio for a long time due to his allergy to turpentine, so he accidentally chose the third studio of the Department of Sculpture which focused on materials and concepts. “It (the third studio) is different from traditional sculpture studios. Its creative form is very open, and quick mind is needed. At that time, Liang Shuo just became a teacher, and he inspired us a lot. I have a strong and urgent desire to express myself. I think that the process of presenting ideas in traditional sculptures is very slow and complicated. At that time, the focus was on painting, but there were also many material experiments and physical attempts.”
It was in a practical course that Li began to confirm that he wanted to develop in the direction of performance art. The instructor assigned 5 minutes for theme to complete a work with no restrictions on themes and forms. While thinking about the work on the way, two stones appeared in front of his eyes, so he had an impulse to use a card camera to record the process of striking the stones within 5 minutes until one of them was smashed, which became Li’s first performance video work “Two Stones”. Just as Newton was hit by an apple and discovered gravitation, Li Binyuan discovered the inner “I”, an uncertain and unknown me.
He has repeatedly mentioned that the body is a part of his works. He said :”I try to make sculptures in the form of performance. The body is not only the best extension of the sculpture tool, but also the first place where things happen. As long as I keep ‘doing’, it is constantly building a system of my art and at the same time, deeply depicting and sculpting the outline of a person.”
Ever since, he has projected his personal feelings of living in the city and his daily life experience into his performance art: In the early morning rush hours in Beijing, when a crowd with unified faces filed into the subway cars, Li Binyuan, pretending no one else was there, sat down and began to brush his teeth, wash his face and shave his beard so as to test the reaction and feedback of the public (Infernal Affairs, 2010); on the top of a mountain in Hong Kong, he light up the lighter following the rhythm of the signal lights in the distance, “I am trying to fitting into this world in my own way and express my own vitality as much as possible within my limits.” (Signal, 2014) This kind of creative method that allows the body to fully participate in the work under the “paradoxical” embodied feeling, as well as the dialogue and power contest through the confrontation of two “things” in the surrounding social and natural environment, has always been running through Li’s performance art practice.
Li Binyuan is not an artist who do “performances art for performance art’s sake”. Apart from performance art, he keeps experimenting with painting, installation and sculpture. He is like a sensor. When living in different environments and meeting different people, he produces various aspects to respond to the surrounding social life and then project it to his art. When he was still a student, he couldn’t afford heating bill in winter and often woke up cold at night. Then he wrote “I don’t want to cry” in ink on a piece of ice, waiting for the sunrise to melt it into water.
Upon graduation, Li Binyuan moved from Songzhuang to Heiqiao Village. In addition to making performance art creations, he also made many mechanical installations. However, the cost of making devices is very high, and he had to find a place to store them. The piles piled up, causing great pressure on him, and the space became more and more limited. Life became very tough like a burden. “It is clearer that the physical creation method of performance art is very simple and direct, and the space cost is very low. I can easily carry a bag, walk around with a DV player and a card camera, and create anytime, anywhere. “
“I don’t set a certain form for my art, he said,” I use whatever language that works, as long as it fits my current state; I like to push myself into uncertainty to create works.” Li Binyuan’s art practice is like everything in the world permeating and interlacing in a “fold” movement, which is full of countless uncertain “events”. These “events” do not have the kind of “inevitability” that Hegel believed, as any kind of ” inevitability ” is likely to be invaded and disturbed by “uncertainty”, which is reflected in various aspects and levels of knowledge phenomena. Therefore, only by embracing the complex and changeable cultural phenomena with “uncertainty” can people constantly explore new possibilities and open up multiple interpretation paths.
Romance and Cruelty
The “body” in performance art is not only its form, but also its existence in the sense of life. The use of the body in art is not a symbol or a metaphor, but a kind of presence. Under an instinctive need, Li Binyuan’s creation guides the body to place the subject of performance in the dislocated relationship between social experience and private experience. While truly carving personal history, Li Binyuan also presents himself as a subject that can be represented.
Every aspect of his life can be the source of tension in his works. During his school days, Li Binyuan was once the president of the “Blank Poetry Club”, an active student literary club at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. The communication and reading activities in the literary club made Li Binyuan pay more attention to the instinctive feelings of the body and the conflict between fiery passion and cold reality, which is presented in a low-cost, absurd, humorous and romantic way. Smash a screw into the concrete floor with a sign of “I miss you”, and title it A Love Letter (2010); he set off fireworks toward a gutter in Heiqiao Village, Beijing, which is called Spring in the Gutter ( 2013); after breaking up with his girlfriend, furiously he ran naked more than a dozen times in Wangjing with an inflatable doll or a cross in the early morning, an “incident” going viral on the Internet in 2013.
Although the “Wangjing Naked Running Man” incident made Li Binyuan “get out of the circle” surprisingly, he admitted that he was not obsessed with becoming an Internet celebrity. “I feel very indifferent to that and even actively avoid interviews from mainstream media. I want to get as little exposure and attention as possible because I don’t have that much to say.”
As a matter of fact, after that incident, Li Binyuan reduced the “absurd” elements in his performance art works by turning from self-mockery and teasing to a calm and quiet state. In Drawing Board (2017), he held a drawing board alone, trying to fight the rushing river over the dam. He fell down and got up again and again. Dressed in white overalls, he used a hammer to smash bricks under his feet on a red brick column until, after four hours, he brought the column down to level with the ground. (Decomposition (2019))
“Many of my works happen in my life,” he said. “It can be isolated and exist independently, or it can reasonably happen in a certain moment in my life. Sometimes works act more like a kind of thermostat, keeping me in a sustainable balance.” These seemingly romantic works are even painful, hard and cruel when you get to know them. Nevertheless, this Sisyphus-style heroic labor has pushed him to the edge of “danger”.
In The Test ( 2015), he tried to entrust his fate to the hands of a long bamboo beside the concrete floor. His original idea was to take off his shoes, climb up the bamboo, and slowly bend it until he touched the ground and put his shoes back on. That step was successfully completed, but Li Binyuan thought that it was not perfect, so he climbed for a second and third time. the bend of the bamboo was far from the ground, and he ran out of strength and fell heavily on the concrete floor and lost consciousness. This attempt of “entrust” caused permanent damage to his cervical spine, and he also suffered a lot from the failure of fight of physical strength against natural strength. In Blocking (2019), he fell halfway down a waterfall while trying to move his body naked amid the roar of water on a slippery rock wall under the impact of a huge current. These dangerous actions and experiences are repeated in him all the time. In 2021, he returned to the waterfall and attempted a fall to complete The Great Waterfall. The current was stronger, making it harder to climb the falls. After a few trial jumps, there was a real accident, which left him with lumbar and rib injuries.
A sound, an unknown signal or a light deliberately let his works into a certain degree of uncontrolled state. Li also enjoys the surprise and stimulation that may appear at any time during the creation, reflecting his free, open, and radical aesthetic attitude. In such a process of infinite distinction and infinite delay, he uses a certain “difference” to destroy the order of center/periphery, normal/abnormal, balance/disorder, thus becoming uncertain, centerless, and blurred movement. Through this process it would be found that “humanity is temperature, it should be a certain frequency outside of physics.”
Li Jia, the curator of Li Binyuan’s solo exhibition Blocking at Mangrove Gallery, described him like this: ” He is not to seek excitement, not to challenge the limit, not to be brave, but to complete his art – – Li Penyuan’s creation is not only from the intuition, the body impulse and the soul of a fire, but also through deliberation, precipitation of experience, repeated planning, practice, and judgment of danger. It is impossible for human beings to compete with the laws of nature, time, physics, and physiology, and Li Binyuan is not arrogant. What he creates, and what he wants to present to himself and to us, is the complete affirmation of life at that moment. Whether it is sunshine or darkness, he will fully affirm and accept it at that moment, and gave it a visible form with his own body. This is the art of Li Binyuan.
Leaving and Returning
Li Binyuan’s self-constructed art practice entails a nomadic vibe that focuses “root and branch”. It’s open and differentiated but the core thought is always “home”, where any travelling man’s heart is. In his works, his hometown and his parents’ living environment often serve as the elements of his creation. A sense of fragmentation in his life has shaped him. In an interview Li said: “My creation has always been dealing with the two relations simultaneously, namely the outward relation (social life) and the inward relation (rural nostalgia). I cannot escape it and I won’t avoid it.”
Since 2012, he started to record how he turn somersaults on the same bridge when he returns to his hometown and he said he would keep on doing it until the bridge collapse. In 2014, he plunged into a rice field he inherited from his late father, rising and falling into the mud again and again until he was exhausted and even vomited. This record lasted for about two hours. Li Binyuan may not be understood by the villagers and the local people for a long time, or even by the general public. With the work Free Farming, He hopes to make a reconciliation with that. The Last Letter is another story of reconciliation. Li Bingyuan, is about to be 36 years old in 2022, he recalled his father who died unexpectedly at the age of 36 while working as a security guard in a factory in Dongguan. He came to Dongguan with the last letter sent home by his father. He broke the content of the letter into 36 paragraphs and invited 36 security guards working in Dongguan. He taught them Cantonese and finally they were able to read the letter completely in Cantonese. The Last Letter actually uncovers the secret past that has been hidden in his heart for more than 20 years and helped him reminisce about the loved ones.
Though having travelled to many cities for creation, Li Binyuan only regards himself as a passer-by. He has been trying to offer delicate and original opinions as much as possible when depicting the “strange” environment in his own language. Surprisingly, to him his hometown is the strangest place. The thought of leaving Beijing and only keeping a warehouse to store his works occurred to him last year. Li Binyuan went back to his hometown, a village in Lanshan County, Yongzhou, Hunan Province and got busy with building a new house in his hometown. “Getting around in my hometown is troublesome, but I need a stable home. Moreover, my father’s unfulfilled wish is to have a house of our own. Now I am fulfilling that with for him.”
A dozen of years in this art career, Li Binyuan has been carrying the spirit of Kuafu pursing the sun (daring to try things that seems to be beyond one’s ability). This “one-man war” he started with his life has been widely known before the war comes to an end. In 2021, Li Binyuan won the Sovereign Outstanding Asian Art Award for his work Slanting Portrait, then he also won “Artist of the Year” in the 5th Wang Shiguo Art Support Project. Wu Hongliang, president of Beijing Fine Arts Academy, commented: “Li Binyuan has been always engaged in the work of ‘remaking’, demonstrating to the world the tenacity and sincerity of an artist. I believe that the very core of art is probably such sincerity’.”
Every time an artist drops paint on a piece of paper, clicks the shutter of a camera, or signs their name on a canvas—-it’s a statement of self-assertion. Li Binyuan pushes this form of self-expression to the fullest in his autobiographical, confessional or emotional art. In his works, he always pours himself all out. His works truthfully and unreservedly express the themes and painful truths that are closely related to his life. All his work seems like a memoir, a long autobiography “written by the body”.
* This article initially published in The Art Journal (formerly known as The Art Newspaper China) in 2022. Issue 93. see below:
