Fushun Case

Fushun Case

"A terrifying and grotesque monster taking form from the earth,gaping its bloody mouth toward the sky." — Akiko Yosano (Japan), Fushun, 1928 

"Blazing a trail,binding reality and the future firmly together." — Li Lijuan, Rise, China's No. 1 Petroleum Plant, 1989 (Female, 24 years old, Oil Workshop Worker) 

Located in Northeast China, Fushun is the city where artist Li Yong was born, lives, and works. "Fushun Case" is a long-term, interdisciplinary research project co-initiated in 2025 by Li Yong alongside curator Dong Bingfeng, scholar Feng Xuefeng, and writer Zhao Song. Fushun and "Fushun Case" serve as mutual interrogations and spatiotemporal coordinates. 

Fushun, known in the early 20th century as "Asia's No. 1 Open-pit Coal Mine," has traversed over a century of history marked by the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, the fall of Northeast China in 1932, and the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Throughout this period, the city has borne pivotal roles in energy economics, political symbolism, and the modernity of 20th-century East Asia. Even against the backdrop of regional decline brought by energy transition and ecological protection in recent years, the colossal 424-meter-deep pit exposed within the landscape stands as a poignant metaphor for China's modernization, remaining a focal point across humanistic disciplines and contemporary art practice. Within this historical and contemporary nexus, Li Yong's sustained research and artistic creation prove unquestionably vital. 

"Li Yong: Fushun Case" marks the first systematic presentation of the artist's long-term creative practice in Fushun. Eschewing a linear chronological sequence, the project focuses on the core concept of "case"—dynamically integrating history, personal memory, landscape studies, textual writing, and multi-media artistic experimentation. This "case" primarily responds to the "unfinished modernity" reflected by Fushun across intertwined spatiotemporal dimensions. Meanwhile, the physical exhibition site—composed of photography, archival images, moving images, and site-specific installations—attempts to forge possibilities for emotional and memory links through discontinuity and dialogicality. 

In my view, a central theme of Li Yong's art responds to the "Thermodynamical Turn" articulated by German artist Hito Steyerl in "Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat". "Heat" serves not only as a metaphor for Fushun, but also as the primary conceptual framework of Li's artistic practice. Works such as "A Landscape Out of Thermal Control" (2019), "Burning Wilderness" (2020), "No. 6500" (2022), "-424 Meters" (2024), "Winter Here Is Also Spring" (2020–2026), and "Qingnian Road" (2026) unequivocally respond to Fushun's individual memories, emotional shifts, and the geological "potentialities" harbored between glory and decline, thermal energy and freezing cold. Thus, Li Yong: Fushun Case resembles a personal essay amid epochal transformations—unadorned yet emitting a moving, quiet light. 

ARTIST: Li Yong

Li Yong was born and resides in Fushun, China. He is an artist and the initiator of Fushun Site, a long-term cross-media research project. His years of continuous in-situ creative practice have culminated in the formation of his core artistic concept “Fushun Time”. Meanwhile, he launched the Fushun Site project to introduce interdisciplinary and open academic discussions into the local artistic context. These two interrelated lines of practice mutually reinforce one another, aiming to loosen the fixed, established perceptions of a place, provoke new artistic reflections, and unveil the latent cultural and spatial tension inherent in the locale. Working primarily across photography, documentary film, and creative writing, his practice adopts an open, boundary-free media approach.

Li Yong was nominated for the Three Shadows Photography Award in 2010 and selected for the TOP20 Emerging Chinese Contemporary Photographers in 2015. His recent exhibitions and art projects include: "Wild Things: The Art of Creators" (Yemu Contemporary Art Space, Hangzhou, 2025); "Rediscovering Time: The 2nd China Contemporary Image Art Annual Exhibition" (Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, 2025); "Site and Geomancy: Poetics of Image, Field and Geography" (Fotografiska Shanghai, 2025; Times Museum, Guangzhou, 2024); "Deterritorialization X Reterritorialization: Spring in Changbai Mountain – 2025 Residency Project" (Northeast Asia Art Archive, 2025); "Sedimentary Solids: Archives of Minerals" (CAFA Art Museum, Beijing, 2024); "Fossil, Sunshine, Sedimentary Body: Joint Art Project of Yu Miao & Li Yong" (Goethe-Institut Beijing, 2024); "Unfinished, Chengdu International Photography Week" (Chengdu Art Museum, 2024). In 2020, his monograph "Chinese Contemporary Photography Catalogue – Li Yong" was published by Zhejiang Photography Publishing House.

CURATOR: Dong Bingfeng

Dong Bingfeng is a curator and art critic. He is currently an editorial board member for the Bordeaux Visual Culture Series and the UK-based journal Photography and Culture. From 2005 to 2025, he successively served as Curator at the Guangdong Museum of Art and UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Deputy Director of the Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Artistic Director of the Li Xianting Film Fund, Academic Director of the OCAT Institute, Researcher at the School of Intermedia Art, China Academy of Art, and Academic Director of the Xie Zilong Photography Museum. 

Since 2005, Dong Bingfeng has curated and engaged in research projects including: "Unarchived History" (2026–present), "Wild Things: The Art of Creators" (2025), "Fushun Live" (2025–present), "Unfinished" (2023), "Body/Cosmos: The Art of Living Together" (2022), "Guangzhou Image Triennial 2021" (2021), "Ways of Seeing: Historical Images in Today's Photography" (2021), "Vitality: Continuation in Changing Chinese Art" (2020–present), "World Image: Xu Bing's Dragonfly Eyes" (2019), "Parochialism / Micro-Cosmopolitanism" (2018), "Camera in Action: Asian Moving Image Art Forum" (2017), "Socialist Modernism" (2017–present), "Screen Test: Chinese Video Art Since the 1980s" (2016), "Living Documents: Shenyang Underground Music 1995–2002" (2016), "Rereading Das Kapital" (2012), "Museum on Paper: 12 Chinese Artists" (2011), "Seeing Through Cinema: Cinematic Traces and Self-Construction in Contemporary Art" (2010), "Workshops: How Artists Work" (2009), "'85 New Wave: The First Contemporary Art Movement in China" (2007), "From Polar Region to Tiexi District: Northeast Contemporary Art, 1985–2006" (2006), and the "2nd Guangzhou Triennial" (2005).