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LI MU

李牧

Re-performing Joseph Beuys

source: apexartorg

Li Mu was born in 1974 in Jiangsu Province, China and lives and works in Shanghai. He graduated from the Suzhou Academy of Art and Design in 1995 and the Academy of Art of Tsinghua University, Beijing in 2001. He has had numerous group exhibitions throughout China and a solo exhibition at the Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai.

Early on, Li worked mainly with video and photography, but over the last two years he has taken a new direction that cannot be easily categorized. Many of his recent works are more process-oriented actions that are very hard to distinguish from the rest of his daily activities. These ideas and actions are presented in a variety of different formats: as objects of documentation, piles of very detailed drawings in journals, photographs and writing on his blog.
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source: takingthestageorg

Project Re-performing History temps to re-establish relationship with historical performance pieces and individual emerging artists based in China. It gives opportunity to the artists to examine historical art pieces from personal perspective taking them as a point of departure for making it’s own work. Many live based works due to lack of actual video documentation of the works, interpretation comes from very simple images from the art magazines or art history books which. Lack of archive material brings possibilities of misinterpretation or further research on a particular pieces of interest where artists tries of re-establish relationship with historical practices.

Initial idea of Re-Performing History comes from recent thinking on producing an exhibition format that could serve as a school, space for discussion and learning process for artists. Exhibition with educational aspect that will foster artists knowledge sharing and production. Format of exhibition or event where discourse, practice and presentation co-exist in without necessary privilege one or another.

Another important aspect of Re-Performing History is artist relation with the public where in many contemporary art exhibition public is only passive viewer of artists practice. Re-Perform History tries to find a way for more active participation, where public is not only simple consumer of ambient but subject.

At the same time artist engagement with public reposes question or role of artists in current environment and potential of perceiving the life that could be much more then we mean by it word.