Li Yongbin 李永斌

From ArtSpeak China (ASC) Wiki

Li Yongbin is a Chinese painter. Born in 1963, Li lives and works in Beijing.

Contents 1 Date & Place of Birth 2 Art 2.1 Face Paintings 3 Exhibitions 4 Acquisitions & Auctions 5 References

[edit] Date & Place of Birth

Li was born in 1963 in Beijing.

[edit] Art

Li Yongbin 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.^[1]

[edit] Face Paintings

Li Yonbin has long examined 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 records the reflection of his own face on a windowpane against a cityscape at the moment of sunset.  As the night falls, the reflection of his face gradually appears while the cityscape slowly fades into darkness. Such works are usually very long in duration and arduous for their beholders. Li Yongbin's aims to render the viewer's sense of time radically acute, at the same time inducing a state of meditation on time, the lapse of time, and the meanings of time and of life. In his paintings, Li portrays his fascination with video, returning to his core themes, ambiguities and messages. "I wanted to stop movement, like a video freeze frame" explains Li Yongbin. "This problem of fixing the moment, I wanted to master it. I wanted to show what I saw, but which didn't exist..." ^[2]

[edit] Exhibitions

For Li Yongbin's full exhibition history, click here.

[edit] Acquisitions & Auctions

For a list of collections containing works by Li Yongbin, click here.

For Li's auction record, click here.

[edit] References

1. ↑ http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/contemporaryartfromchina/exhibitionguide.htm
2. ↑ http://www.chengxindong.com/index.php?option=com_xdcsection&sectionid=4&task=artists1&catid=41&artid=49&Itemid=42&lang=en