Li Binyuan: Solemn Hour

text by Zhou Yi

translated by Xu Xiaofan

Solemn Hour is sparked off by a real-life event, a relocation that took place in the artist’s life. As an exhibition it can be said to be incidental, putting an individual’s personal history and the unfamiliar works of a familiar artist on display.[1] The main body of the exhibition is Li Binyuan’s paintings, spanning from the earliest years of his artistic training up to this year. These works reveal a thread—an image maker[2], receptive and feminine—that runs counter to his well-recognized signature attitude of repudiation. Unexpectedly, these unfamiliar paintings assume a more up-close and personal quality than previous existentialist readings and interpretive frameworks constructed from the spontaneity of the body. If Li has long been construed in terms of his masculine and rebellious life force that is sometimes death-driven, here he has spilled out a tender and bare emotional life.

The radicalism of Li’s performance art is well known by the art world. We are familiar with him in the vanguard; in this exhibition he trails behind instead. These paintings abound in old-fashioned obsolescence: beauty of color, academic studies, thematic compositions, psychology, surrealism, a mishmash of styles from history of art, the use of symbolism to convey emotions, elegant pictorial quality, an abundance of imagination, an overflow of hormone, and modest moral restraint. However, the purpose of exhibiting these beautiful paintings is not for a retroactive account of the artist’s early experience. Rather, the exhibition sets out to show these elements—which are very much active, alive and consciously felt—as integral to Li’s practice. They form an entry into Li’s entire body of work.

Crossing over from performance art to painting would require a substance both viscous and lubricative. “Apply lard all over my body before falling over into the landscape”, Li says.[3] In the work “The Great Waterfall”, he persistently climbs up the waterfall in a way that both seems and actually borders upon suicide, and leaps down at the moment when he loses control of his body in the torrents. The artist insists on foregrounding the absurdly hollow act of applying lard. It is an easily overlooked operation step, or shall we say, a “stain” in a Lacanian sense, which has but to be deliberately ignored in the work’s interpretations due to the rupture of meaning it incurs. The artist applies lard all over his body before climbing the waterfall, and does not attempt to clarify the purpose of doing so. Does it serve a technical purpose? We would guess. Is it necessitated by the process, or by the effect? The lard may keep one warm, but adds to the hazards of climbing in the rapids for one slips more easily. The artist confesses that the act is intuitive and is not reasoned out. Smearing the whole body with lard seems a ritualistic protection supposed to shield his body—to no avail—from the real danger. Yet if we are to take “The Great Waterfall” in its entirety as an image that lives in the artist’s mind, then the lard becomes the symbolic medium essential for his body to leap into and merge with that image. It even points to the real motive underlying his creation the way Klein used paint on live models’ bodies, which then act as his paintbrush.

I simply let out (paint) the current feelings and images in my mind through an act. The signifier that I output is very close to Shitao’s theory of painting in essence. Every move aims to approximate the image generated in my mind at a particular moment. An image is the externalization of one’s emotional will. (Li Binyuan)[4]

For quite a long time in Chinese contemporary scene, new media, installation and performance art have shouldered the role of upgrading traditional mediums. Every academy-trained artist in China started by training in a set of representational skill regarded obsolete by today’s standards. Many have in fact broken away from the education previously imposed on them, had an epiphany at some point in their career and moved on unswervingly to adopt a more radical contemporary art language. Yet for Li, there has been no such break or watershed from his education to his professional practice: he cherishes all his past artistic experiences and has preserved almost all of his studies ever since 7th grade. From his juvenilia we see a natural sensitivity to and instinctive immersion in color, to which he was whole heartedly involved from the very first moment. As a painter and as a performance artist, Li is equally ready to lay bare his true qualities. He would not consider his early studies irrelevant to his current professional practice, and the very same energies underlie both his act of painting and of performance art. This reminds me the works of American artist Martin Wong and the less glamorous practitioners like him[5]—in UCCA’s current exhibition “Somewhere Downtown: Art in 1980s New York”.[6] They are naked, commonplace, and wronged, their life is suffused with a Buster Keatonesque fearlessness and passion.[7] Their works distrust the hierarchy of taste in the art world, value the emotional connection between people, and distain nihilism. Similarly, Li’s paintings expose a vulnerable inside and lay bare his physiological and emotional status for examination; he does this knowingly, laying down all defense for public scrutiny. “Aesthetic is deadly”, says Li[8], referring to the cost of his “suicidal” performances, though showing outdated taste may be more dangerous. It’s a different adventure into the unknown, accepting oneself in whole and opening up to the gaze of others.

When you see how much color helps, hates, penetrates, touches, doesn’t that parallel life. (Josef Albers)

The experience of color is by nature uncertain. To acquire the eyes of color for an artist would resemble the act of leaping into the void. Josef Albers, the spokesperson of modern color theory, believes that the interaction of colors is analogous to human social behavior. In the same sense, Li’s performance art can be considered as having color, in its possessing a force to disregard meaning and connect every random thing. He superimposes a heterogeneous body onto reality, then “merges all layers”, to form a whole new picture. When Li’s earlier works—“Infernal Affairs”, “Paradise, An Unnamed Act”, “Parallel With The Night”, and “Long Jump”—are seen through the eyes of color, one can immediately appreciate this inscription of the figure, with a rhythmic pulse of urban graffiti. The ability to leap in and out the frame enabled him to overlook the entire picture from his inner point of view—even from amidst the action.

By definition, performance art is a rebellion against the material image, as the images only serve as a visual record. Performance art emphasizes life situations, and it is real rather than acting. A performance artist must exorcise images from his or her consciousness, whatever is left of the systematic training. However, “Solemn Hour” presents a series of works that is regressive for they mingle image and performance. Li’s performance art is not thoroughgoing in that it originates from a pictorial imagination, and meanwhile, his paintings enact imagination so directly that they pay no regard to the unique qualities of the medium. Yet, conversely, his paintings allows ordinary viewers to immerse, and his performance has a painting like endurance: for him the two art forms are distinct yet isomorphic. He wouldn’t jettison works that belong to a certain period and are hindered by past scope of knowledge. What are the arguments against aesthetic unity in an artist’s career? To start with, truth outweighs correctness in this exhibition, which is about an individual’s personal past. Moreover, no performance art exists that is purged of all impurities, for to defy the material image boils down to the discontent with concentration and closed systems. In his recent works such as “Freedom Farming”, there emerges a watershed in values, from challenging the status quo to a return to traditional ethics. In the meantime, in the challenges they lodge to the limits of his body, his creations are increasingly involved with real danger. How are we to interpret the mass audience engaged with collective empathy and rituals of sacrifice in his recent works? What exactly does Li’s artistic practice demand of us? If the real injuries and dangers continue to escalate, how will future creations be sustained? Has the artist lost his way, or have we as the viewers? With a sense of bewilderment we enter into Li’s personal history.