The high-speed operation of contemporary urban life often cuts an individual’s daily life into countless fragments. These fragments not only show the richness of life but also reflect the complexity of mental states. Urbanites shuttle between information, consumption, and pressure every day, and the fragmentation of individual life becomes more obvious. The seemingly orderly urban landscape is actually full of microscopic ‘disorder’: individuals wander among multiple identities and countless trivial matters, and the pursuit of a stable and complete internal order often seems out of reach. In such a complex and diverse environment, building an internal balance between order and disorder coincides with Xiong Lijun’s creative thinking in recent years. Following previous image expressions such as cartoon narratives and urban subcultures, Xiong Lijun’s recent works have turned to focus on people and human nature, and thinking about the sense of drift and rootlessness of contemporary people. By magnifying visual symbols of consumer culture, such as dazzling laser ribbons and other elements, the complexity of colors is intertwined with geometric forms and the states of ‘disorder’ and ‘order’. The themes it focuses on are more concentrated on the interrelationships between slices and wholes, abstract and concrete, order and logic. This “Order with Rhythm” – Xiong Lijun’s art exhibition precisely explores how individuals can find a deeper self-worth and adhere to the integrity of spirit in the urban context under the impact of nihilism and consumerism.
