ARTIST BIO: FENG Bingyi
Feng Bingyi (born 1991 in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, China. Lives and works in Shanghai) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans video installations, digital painting, photography, animation, and spatial/media art. Drawing poetic inspiration from texts, cinema, and the cosmos, she explores the fracture between text and image. Feng takes existing texts, dissects their logical structures, and reconstructs narrative spaces that feel both poetic and philosophical. She combines elements from cinema—particularly experimental and poetic film language—with digital imagery and installation to immerse viewers in introspective realms. Her core themes include humanity’s relationship with the universe, existential wonder, and collective connectivity. One of China’s most compelling voices in emergent media art, Feng Bingyi crafts audiovisual experiences that feel like cinematic dreams made of words, film, and celestial wonder. Her practice is steeped in the timeless tremor of human longing.
In 2013 Feng Bingyi earned her B.A. from the School of Intermedia Art, China Academy of Arts, Hangzhou, then completed an M.F.A. with distinction at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, in 2015. Recent solo exhibitions include: She Walks in Beauty, Fool's Gold, Cold Truth (A Thousand Plateaus Art Space, Chengdu, China, 2020/2018/2016); The Story of Your Life II (Surplus Space, Wuhan, China, 2017). Selected group exhibitions include: 2020: Future, Future (CEF Art Theater). 2019: VT Art Salon, Taipei, Taiwan; China Academy of Art Museum, Hangzhou, China; UNArt Center, Shanghai, China; The Delaware Contemporary, Wilmington, Delaware, USA. 2018: OCT Art and Culture District, Anren, Chengdu, China. 2017: Today Art Museum, Beijing, China; Mode A Contemporary Space, Xiamen, Fujian, China; ZhuZhong Art Museum, Beijing, China; A Thousand Plateaus Art Space, Chengdu, China. 2016: Long March Space, Beijing, China; Between Art Lab, Shanghai; Zhujiajiao Art Space, Shanghai; Vacuum Gallery, Beijing; Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai; Inna Art Space, Hangzhou, China. 2015; Chelsea Cookhouse Gallery, London, UK; Helsinki Festival - Here out There, Helsinki, Finland; MOMENTUM & Leap Labs, Berlin, Germany; CAFA Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing. 2014: Power Station of Art, Shanghai; Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing; MOMENTUM & Chronus Art Center, Berlin, Germany; Get It Louder Festival, Beijing.
MOMO
2016, 2-channel video installation:
The starting point is also the end point, HD video, colour, sound, 7:39
Monument, HD video, 4:25, b/w, silent
Courtesy A Thousand Plateaus Art Space, Chengdu
The 2-channel video installation, MOMO, is loosely based on the eponymous heroine of the 1973 fantasy novel “Momo, or the strange story of the time-thieves and the child who brought stolen time back to the people”, by German author, Michael Ende. In a poetic approximation of this story about time thieves, MOMO is a meditation upon the future and the past as one state of being – a wrinkle in time which enfolds countless futures and pasts – much like the two unsynchronized channels of this video installation will forever create a new confluence of images, the work never visually repeating itself in quite the same way. Feng Bingyi describes this artwork as, “Momo is a character that exists outside of time, as if she could be absolutely still or a being that remains in perpetual motion. As such, even she can't figure out which dimension she exists in. Momo is a person who is not limited by time and space, being both our oldest ancestor and a modern person, and it can be said that she is both a person from the time of the world's origin and the formation of the Earth, and a person from the time of the universe's demise and destruction.” In the film, Feng Bingyi has Momo say, “I tried to measure the forms of time - in a geographical way. I now ride on billions of torn molecules experiencing a myriad of possibilities. I - am Momo herself - and you too. I exist in space and time, I am the fragments and the whole subject, and our story never ends”. Much as the literary basis of this artwork is a fantasy of travel through time and space, so too does Feng Bingyi invoke the quantum principles of parallel universes to create a character who within herself encompasses both many futures and many pasts. As the work unfolds, we watch Momo speak soundlessly, perhaps narrating the tale of a mountaineer lost amongst the snowy peaks above the clouds. While on the adjoining screen, this timeless woman, existing in two places at once, walks alone through various eerily empty landscapes and waterfronts; tidal flatlands, endless fields, waves gently lapping along beaches, twinkling stars in a dark sky which could actually be the lava flow marking the earth’s beginning and end. These are cyclical landscapes: tide following tide, day following day and creation following destruction in the perpetual cycle of futures past.