BINGYI

An artist, architectural designer, curator, cultural critic, and social activist, Bingyi (b. 1975, Beijing) has developed a multi-faceted practice that encompasses land and environmental art, site-specific architectural installation, musical and literary composition, ink painting, performance art, and filmmaking. Adopting a non-anthropocentric perspective and channeling nature’s creative agency, her work is centrally concerned with the themes of ecology, ruins, rebirth, and poetic imagination. After pursuing university-level studies in biomedical and electronic engineering in the United States, Bingyi earned a Ph.D. in Art History and Archeology from Yale University in 2005 with a dissertation on the art of the Han Dynasty.

In her large-scale ink paintings, Bingyi uses ink as “dark light” —carbon, an absolute absorber of light, in water, nature’s universal translucent solvent—to illuminate the usually invisible and transient physical processes that enable ordered patterns and forms to arise from chaos. Over months or even years, she collaborates with the environmental conditions of a specific site to capture a reality-scaled record of the climatic and topological forces shaping a natural or urban landscape. She then uses installation and performance to recuperate these forces in the live embodied experience of the viewer.