Li Yongbin

March 25, 2015

Jasmine Lark

Alias of Jasmina Sevic, a researcher and author for Widewalls. She graduated from the Faculty of Political Science (Department for Journalism) in Belgrade in 2013.

Li Yongbin, born in 1963 in Beijing, belongs to the first generation of artistic innovators of the post-Mao era. Self-taught, he gave up painting in the late 1990s to work exclusively with video. Using the barest of means and the simplest of techniques, he creates work of great, and often disturbing, power. Frequently using his own face, or simple shadows, duration and repetition introduce a strongly psychological dimension to his work.

Li Yongbin has always been fascinated by the representation of temporality and the ways and possibilities in which we perceive events unfolding. In the last decades he has made numerous unedited real-time recordings of non-dramatic events, or rather, nonevents. For example, in Face he recorded the reflection of his own face on a windowpane against a cityscape at the moment of sunsets and as the night falls, the reflection of his face gradually appeared while the cityscape slowly faded into darkness. Those works are usually very long in duration and arduous for their beholders.

Li Yongbin’s work has made the sense of time radically acute, at the same time it leads us into a state of meditating time, the lapse of time, the meanings of time and life. In his paintings Li Yongbin wanted to portray the fascination that he discovered with video, return to these themes, ambiguities and equivocal messages.

Looking at his canvases one after the other, one can see the flashes of inspiration from videos. The head emerges from the flames and raises questions on the limits of space. Other paintings perfectly conveys the idea of speed, to such a point that the face represented in close-up on the canvas seems ready to escape from it. The eyes, always very striking, from one painting to another, emerge from shadows. With the lack of colour, the light of the paintings appears even more dazzling.

His work has been included in many solo and group exhibitions in China, Germany, France, Australia, Belgium, Switzerland, and USA, among others.