SELECTED WRITINGS
Becoming Li Binyuan: Portrait of a Heiqiao Performance Artist
Aug 2025
The outskirts of Beijing are sites to test the limits of reality. From 2011 to 2017, Li Binyuan lived in the eastern village Heiqiao, home to an unsanctioned cluster of makeshift studios that offered low rent to young artists with practices outside the mainstream. It was here that Li began to stage a series of performances, distancing himself from the city’s rapid transformations.
The term Heiqiao—once merely geographical—has come to represent a generation of Chinese artists who remained on the periphery of official narratives. Heiqiao not only shaped Li’s artistic language, but acted as a collaborator. Its precarious state permitted him to launch fireworks into a sewer or cycle with kitchen knives strapped to his shoes, sending sparks flying across asphalt. Each gesture is charged with the violence and vulnerability of a body mapping contested public space. At Song Art Museum in Beijing, documentation of these performances are displayed on vintage televisions balanced on worn wooden pallets and surrounded by the props used in their production, lending the installation a raw, tactile immediacy.
Sound Everywhere: The Beijing Show Indexing Our Sonic World
Apr 2025
I remember the cultural vibrancy of Beijing in the 2010s. In the downtown area, people crowded into narrow hutongs (alleyways) for openings at small independent art spaces, impromptu performances unfolded on the streets, and 'live houses'—intimate venues for rock, jazz, and folk music, often doubling as bars—thrived. That energy has since been replaced by a thoroughly commercialised, touristic scene.
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Shanyu Zhong is Beijing-based. She writes, edits, and translates.