RUMOUR

was born in Yongzhou, Hunan Province, China in 1985, and graduated from the Department of Sculpture, Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2011. Now lives and works in Berlin and Yongzhou. Li explores physicality, substance, surrounding environment, conceptual cognition, and social values through physical actions, video works, and performances which are the port of entry to the social fabric of everyday 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 are intertwined. His artistic practice is motivated by the needs to know one's spatial and material environment through bodily interaction in order to question and transcend the norms and ideologies our environments impose.
His work has exhibited throughout the US, Europe, and Asia, and is in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art and other art institutions.

05th February

On the opening day of the Bergen International Literary Festival this year, we had the honour to present—not a book, nor a poem, nor a piece of writing—but a gigantic tongue. A tongue that poses a threat with its inhuman size and ominous name—Rumour—as opposed to the festival’s theme this year, namely, Truth.

This is an installation by the renowned Chinese visual and performance artist Li Binyuan, who actually visited Bergen around this time last year. He is a leading figure in contemporary Chinese art who does not confine his creativity within China’s cultural and political context but creates critically acclaimed works that address global issues.

To whom could this tongue belong? Some blustering politician whose mouth is big enough to accommodate such a monstrosity? Internet trolls hiding behind their vicious and abusive words? Or perhaps it’s the AI everyone’s talking about—materialised as this organ of speech, infiltrating our verbal battles? Regardless, we can’t argue with it—it doesn’t have ears to listen.

In Chinese, we have an idiom for verbal battles—唇枪舌剑—which means to use lips as spears and the tongue as a sword. So, since this is a literary festival, we, together with all the guest writers present, took it literally and counterattacked this giant tongue—the source of rumours—with a bow and arrows.