Li Binyuan

About the Artist

Born in Yongzhou—a city in China’s Hunan Province—in 1985, Li Binyuan is one of China’s leading performance artists. He completed his BFA in Sculpture at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, the city where he continues to live and work today.

Li’s works are often marked by struggle and futility, expressing a confusion with the illogic of contemporary social, political, and economic structures. In Freedom Farming (2014), for example, Li spent two hours throwing himself in the mud of a field in his home village on land he inherited after his father’s death. In other works he has used a hammer to smash other hammers and run naked through the streets of Beijing—deliberate but desperate outbursts of emotions ranging from rage to joy.

In 2018, New York‘s MoMA PS1 featured Li’s recent performances with early works by Zhang Huan, one of the great Chinese performance artists of the previous generation, in the exhibition Land: Zhang Huan and Li Binyuan. Li’s works have been collected by The Museum of Modern Art in New York, M+ Museum for Visual Culture in Hong Kong, KADIST in Paris and San Francisco, and the White Rabbit Collection, among other institutions.

Ocula | 2019