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

Taking everyday objects as a point of departure, Still Life sees Li Bing-Ao reconfigure pages from books that have been carried for years, repeatedly leafed through, yet never fully finished. Images and sounds are translated into a temporal structure that more closely aligns with the rhythm of daily life, shaped by companionship, delay, return, and the unfinished. For Li Bing-Ao, these objects are not merely vessels for content; they function as triggers for memory and the senses. Their value lies not in arriving at a narrative conclusion, but in what accrues through each cycle of opening, pausing, and setting down: the private annotations, traces, and lingering scents that quietly accumulate over time.

The exhibition originates from a note Li Bing-Ao made in a notebook in 2021. Rather than prioritising the texts or audiovisual materials themselves, he became increasingly attentive to the symbols and marginal remarks left alongside what held his interest. These minute marks occupy an in-between state, suspended between reading and looking, between the backdrop of lived experience and the foreground of artistic production. Through acts of searching, reorganising, and sustained observation, objects once consigned to the background are, at certain moments, brought forward as still lifes to be regarded. No longer defined by function alone, they become visual fields that register preference, habit, and states of mind.

In contrast to earlier works that pursued heightened sensory density through layered collage and entanglement, this new body of work sees Li Bing-Ao turn toward a quieter, steadier gaze. It is as if a thin seam is opened within the familiar, allowing the most ordinary items to be renamed, reordered, and reinterpreted from the vantage point of the object itself. Coffee, book pages, fragments of moving image, and a satisfying set meal coalesce into a micro topography, one concerned with nourishment and endurance, and with how taste takes form through repetition and choice. Here, Still Life does not signify a descriptive rendering of things, but a subsidiary route that begins in lived experience and leads toward structures of perception and desire: a presentation that is more partial, more intimate, and ultimately more candid.