Location:
Shanghai Exhibition Centre, 1000 Yan’an Road (C), Shanghai

VIP Days:
2025.05.08，14:00-20:00
2025.05.09，12:00-20:00

Public Days:
2025.05.10，11:00-20:00
2025.05.11，11:00-18:00

MANGROVEGALLERY is pleased to announce it’s participation in Photofairs Shanghai 2025, representing artist Li Binyuan with the artworks Give Back and Amphitheater #2, in the Perspective sector at booth S09.

Li explores physicality, material, conceptual cognition, and social values through actions-based film works and performances that intervene in the social fabric of everyday Chinese society. His experiments occupy urban and rural spaces, from public scenery of the streets to natural sites, or remote post-industrial locations. Using his body as a sculptural material to enact creative investigation. He uses ruptures and repetition to manifest how sculpture and performance can intertwine. Rearticulating social conduct while interrogating our experiences of the everyday.

In Give Back (2023), Li Binyuan recreates his childhood ritual of sucking nectar in the mountains: he picks a bamboo stem and connects himself to a camellia flower, drawing nectar like a bee. As he says, ‘If the camellia flower has nourished me (and even now), then I will give back to it with my emotions, my spirit, and my art. The sweetness and purity of camellia nectar is a gift from the land to man, and I honour it with the highest respect.’

In Amphitheatre #2 (2024), Li Binyuan transforms the circular central courtyard of an abandoned chemical factory north of Fuxian Lake in Yunnan, into an aerial theatre, suspending himself over twenty metres in the air by burning ropes, creating an open, vertical environment within the vast space.After an accidental fall that resulted in a broken finger, he instinctively retreated but quickly returned, improvising a response by reconnecting the broken fire ropes with his arms. This act embodied the artist’s direct reaction to fragmentation and restoration, reconfiguring the relationship between body and environment.