Li Bing Ao: Still life Another Scenic Package: Solo Exhibition

Haruki Murakami's autobiographical essays, Yoshitomo Nara's notebooks, small books on cigarettes and sugar, even a few cherished YouTube clips and songs, these are the things I keep close. I often bring them with me when I travel or head out. To me, they are essential. From time to time, I take them out again to read or watch, as if revisiting them could summon a familiar scent, or return me to a particular atmosphere. Yet I have never fully finished any of them. I am not entirely sure why. Perhaps I am afraid that this kind of companionship might come to an end. I know it will end one day, but that day has not arrived. They form a kind of self-indulgent mass in which living and making run alongside each other. I am drawn to these things in the same way I am drawn to my own process, full of postponements and repeated revisions. I keep waiting for the right moment to begin, and to finally bring something to completion, always choosing to start and to end at the point that feels most charged.

This exhibition began with a note in my notebook from 2021. Rather than the content of these books and media, I find myself more concerned with the marks they generate, the annotations I make in response to the things that hold my attention, or rather, the "things" themselves. Immersed in browsing and searching, I came to realize that objects that once served merely as the background of everyday life can, at certain moments, become the subject. In those moments they appear vivid and strangely compelling. With this exhibition, I shift from an earlier impulse toward excess, pursuing the pleasure and density produced through image splicing and visual entanglement, toward a more static form of looking, a sustained gaze fixed on images that I am drawn to. Like the morning Americano that keeps me going, or a satisfying set meal, I want to see what gets served this time, what good things are placed on the table.

In completing this exhibition, I also complete another sideline, something I have long, vaguely wanted to resolve. It starts from life, from more private material, from my own preferences and the "good things" I hold dear. It is like a shallow fissure, within which lie the most ordinary objects. I extract and relocate them, and reinterpret them again from the standpoint of the object.