冰逸 BING Yi

Photo: Courtesy of the Artist

1975生于北京,现于北京生活和工作。

冰逸同时身兼建筑设计师、作家、策展人、文化评论家和社会活动家等身份,其丰富多元的艺术实践融合了她对生态学、科学、哲学、史学和美学等领域的兴趣,并涵盖了大地与环境艺术、特定场域的建筑-装置艺术、音乐与文学创作、水墨绘画以及行为表演艺术。冰逸最广为人知的作品可能是她的巨幅水墨。这些作品历经数月甚至数年创作,利用特定的现场环境,对塑造出自然环境或城市景观的气候、地形等作用力进行捕捉和真实的记录,最终形成画面。与之相对的则是冰逸私密的、画风细致入微的扇面作品,它们探索有机生命的微观起源。这些作品令人联想起严谨工整的工笔画,但仔细观察冰逸的用笔,会发现其中蕴含着一种创造性和写意的品质,这种品质来自于她日常的小楷练习。透过冰逸执着而又极富耐力的笔触、坚忍而细腻的创作,人们能感知到大自然本身由无机物质中缔造生命的爱。

冰逸1975年生于北京,后赴美攻读生物医学与电子工程,2005年取得耶鲁大学艺术史与考古学博士学位,论文题目为汉代艺术史。她曾于西班牙阿里坎特省当代艺术博物馆(2014)、德国柏林圣约翰福音大教堂(2012)、美国芝加哥大学斯马特艺术博物馆(2010)、比利时布鲁塞尔Erna Hecey画廊(2009)、中国上海对比窗艺廊(2009)以及美国纽约Max Protetch画廊(2008)举办个展。她的作品曾参加美国布法罗奥尔布赖特·诺克斯美术馆的”覆盖者”展览(2011)、中国北京今日美术馆”意派—世纪思维”展览(2009),并亮相”第七届韩国光州双年展年度报告:一年来的展览”(2008)。

冰逸不仅创作了引人入胜的绘画作品,她更是一位杰出的装饰和行为艺术家。2014年十月冰逸在多伦多市政厅中心平台进行十二小时的户外公开表演项目”圙:给非地球人”,创作了一幅1800平米的水墨画。此后不到三个月,在深圳宝安国际机场邀请下,冰逸借助悬置、重力、大地和风力,在直升机上向一片覆盖了帆布的机场地面进行”轰炸”,投掷了每袋二十千克的油墨包”导弹”(总重五百千克),进而创作了名为《悬置》的巨幅公共作品并悬挂于深圳机场大楼正中位置。这俗称”墨弹”的作品迅即在互联网上风靡一时。

近年来,她将注意力转向电影制作,致力于记录日渐消失的北京胡同。她的叙事电影三部曲《废墟》将于2019年春季在洛杉矶郡艺术博物馆和尤伦斯当代艺术中心首映。

冰逸的作品已被多所国际艺术机构收藏,包括澳洲悉尼白兔中国当代艺术收藏、美国芝加哥大学Smart艺术博物馆、西班牙阿里坎特省当代艺术博物馆、中国北京中国妇女儿童博物馆等。冰逸的艺术是三部纪录片的主题:《墨咏—当代水墨画家系列:冰逸的疯狂》,这部由温成拍摄、林似竹博士导演的纪录片旨在诠释冰逸作为水墨画家的创作过程;其它两部纪录片:《风的形状》讲述了冰逸的”大地与气候”艺术,《悬置》则记录了深圳机场项目,二者皆由温成拍摄和剪辑。

b. 1975, lives and works in Beijing

An artist, architectural designer, curator, cultural critic, and social activist, Bingyi (b. 1975, Beijing) has developed a multi-faceted practice that encompasses land and environmental art, site-specific architectural installation, musical and literary composition, ink painting, performance art, and filmmaking. Adopting a non-anthropocentric perspective and channeling nature’s creative agency, her work is centrally concerned with the themes of ecology, ruins, rebirth, and poetic imagination. After pursuing university-level studies in biomedical and electronic engineering in the United States, Bingyi earned a Ph.D. in Art History and Archeology from Yale University in 2005 with a dissertation on the art of the Han Dynasty.

In her large-scale ink paintings, Bingyi uses ink as “dark light” —carbon, an absolute absorber of light, in water, nature’s universal translucent solvent—to illuminate the usually invisible and transient physical processes that enable ordered patterns and forms to arise from chaos. Over months or even years, she collaborates with the environmental conditions of a specific site to capture a reality-scaled record of the climatic and topological forces shaping a natural or urban landscape. She then uses installation and performance to recuperate these forces in the live embodied experience of the viewer.

In October 2013, she occupied the center of Toronto’s city hall to create a 1,800 square meter ink painting over the course of a twelve-hour outdoor public performance entitled Metamorphosis: To the Non-earthlings. Less than three months later, she created Epoché, a huge public performance and installation commissioned by the Shenzhen Bao’an International Airport. Working with the conditions of suspension, gravity, land, and wind, she bombarded an airfield with 20-kilogram oil-and-ink “missiles”—500 kilograms of material in total—at different heights from a helicopter. The resultant monumental canvas, a record of the performance and event, was hung centrally in the airport for a month. Nicknamed modan or “ink bomb,” the piece became an internet sensation.

In her March 2015 solo show at Ink Studio, she created a two-floor immersive environment with her massive 2013 work Wanwu. Wanwu is the most recent in her series of land and weather works created at sacred mountain sites in China that register the effects of wind, sun, humidity, air pressure, and terrain with ink and water on bespoke xuan paper. Installed again in a different manner for the Encounters public program of Art Basel Hong Kong 2016, Wanwu was a highlight of the art fair and was centrally featured in a variety of media outlets, including being selected as one of the top fifteen booths by Artsy. Recently, Bingyi has extended her nature paintings to incorporate the agencies of ice and sound waves.

At the other end of her practice, Bingyi explores the microscopic origins of organic life in intimate, small-format paintings, in which her minute and meticulous brushwork paradoxically reveals a profoundly creative, gestural, and “calligraphically expressive” quality drawn from her daily calligraphy routine. Through her hypnotic, obsessive endurance and execution both painstaking and nuanced, one senses the loving power of nature itself as it crafts animate life from inanimate matter. Her encyclopedic series Fairies are “catalogues” of the endless virtual forms assumed by organismic life, each with an associated personal anecdote or poetic fantasy.

In recent years, she has turned her attention to film-making. Part of a larger project documenting the disappearance of Beijing hutong, her narrative film trilogy Ruins will premier at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in spring 2019.

Bingyi has exhibited internationally at Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art (2016); Istanbul Modern (2016); Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Alicante, Alicante, Spain (2014), St. Johannes-Evangelist-Kirche, Berlin, Germany (2012), Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA (2010), Galerie Erna Hecey, Brussels, Belgium (2009), Contrasts Gallery, Shanghai, China (2009), and Max Protetch Gallery, New York, USA (2008). Her works have also been included in Surveyors, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, USA (2011), and Yipai, the Opening of the New Wing, Today Art Museum, Beijing, China (2009), and featured at The 7th Gwangju Biennale, Annual Report: A Year in Exhibitions, Gwangju, South Korea (2008).

Bingyi’s works can be found in the White Rabbit Contemporary Chinese Art Collection, Sydney, Australia; and the collections, among others, of, the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Alicante, Alicante, Spain; and Museum of Chinese Women and Children, Beijing, China. She has been the subject of three documentaries: The Enduring Passion for Ink—A Series on Contemporary Ink Painters: Bingyi’s Madness, on Bingyi’s process as an ink painter, filmed by Richard Widmer and directed by Britta Erickson; Shape of the Wind, on Bingyi’s land and weather art, and Epoché, on Bingyi’s Shenzhen airport performance/event, both filmed and edited by Richard Widmer.

冰逸:不可能的仙山

Bing Yi: Impossible Landscapes, BING Yi