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M+, Hong Kong. M+ Council for New Art Fund, 2018, © Li Binyuan
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Mediatheque
Li Binyuan 厲檳源
Freedom Farming 自由耕種
2014
Li Binyuan’s two-hour performance Freedom Farming is a personal intervention into issues of land ownership through sustained physical effort. Upon his father’s death, Li was granted the right to inherit 0.1 mu of farmland in his home village. His inheritance was made possible by the 1983 land reform, in which the government allocated each rural household with farmland that had previously been part of a system of public ownership. Beginning with an image of the Certificate of Land issued by Dahankou Village of Hunan, the video shows Li repeatedly throwing himself into the air and falls to the muddy rice paddy. Villagers look on as he continues his performance and grows increasingly exhausted. Li’s body becomes a means to form an intimate, almost desperate relationship with the land.
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