Li Binyuan: Give Back opened on Feb. 25th, 2024 at MANGROVEGALLERY. This is the first time in three years that the artist has put together and presented to us his recent works in a solo exhibition. Li selects from the collection of works completed between 2022 and 2023, including experimental film Trace, commissioned by Public Art Norway (KORO), and Performance on the Windowsill, as well as accompanying photos of the performance art. Also on show would be two videos made in 2015, Rising, and Sinking.

In recent years, through performances that push his body to the limit, he turns his inner endurance into physical imagery of the human body, into a Sisyphus that throws himself to the muddied ground, repeatedly, to interrogate this land with a mortal soul. The body is the absolute protagonist; it confronts. It falls. It struggles. It rises. It stagnates. And it degenerates. We can hardly remove our eyes from the flowing imagery created with a body, which is aphoristic like an aphorism, and electrifying like an electric current. Seeing becomes witnessing.

But there is another Li, who sometimes retreats from the center of our vision, or deliberately draws our attention away to somewhere else. As a result, perhaps, this thread of thought may often stow away behind the most scintillating and riveting performance…

The exhibition will be on view till 20th of April, 2024.