Li Bingsheng: Wealthy City
2020.4.9.- 2020.5.17.
Artists: Li Bingsheng

“Wealthy City” is a fictitious real estate project. It adopts project research, sales presentation, promotional activities to present the relationship between entrepreneurial capital, property law, and social class. In particular, it is rooted in actual personal history and regional architectural aesthetics while engaging in issues of social production and development with the spirit of a general entrepreneur, as well as the various types of complex, contradictory, or even degenerate aspects of today’s life.


"Wealthy City" comes from the term "wealthy," which embodies a strong regional and cultural feature. This kind of terminology is common in commercial real estate in China. “Wealthy City” sets the scene at a property salesroom invested by Henggu Ltd, the manager of the company who made his fortune in construction materials (cement), is diligent, hardworking, and appreciates modern art. With random luck, through merger, he got a piece of reserved land where he launched the small property right real estate project "Wealthy City." Along with the projected plot, in the course of the project, the crisis began to brew, the government, villagers, and local mafia became involved. The narrative of "Wealthy City" is strung together by personal experience, family memories, and history at large, in which family memories form an essential component of the overall narrative, it's both emotionally stimulating and logically concise.



Li Bingsheng is a typical conceptual artist who focuses on "events" among the generation. Compare to the "structural" way of thinking. He is not obsessed with the history of art or its ontological issues. Breaking away from these confines, the artist's primary practice expands on creating "events." Although these events may not leave an impact or cause the transformation to actual society, observant of the current state of things is embodied in the politicization of this creative approach. "Wealthy City" as a vehicle of the "event" the artist has set up, present a high degree of openness and tension. The event itself encompasses the geographical features of the accelerated development in the southeast coastal cities, while its commonality and similarity projects all regions and areas in China. In contrast, at the core of the project, one discovers the artist's personal sentiments and the visual intervention from appropriating the modernist aesthetics of Bauhaus architecture. All of which constitute the contradictory scenes in the fictitious "Wealthy City."