Li Jingxiong

Li Jingxiong, born 1987, Anhui, China. He lives and works in Shanghai.

 

Using a form of documentary fiction, Li Jingxiong makes complex installations and graphic works made from found materials such as computer keyboards and monitors on platforms of wood, copper and steel. He has used fire as a way to embrace chaos and lack of control, burning luxury clothing in an act of resistance and as a symbol of the ‘learned helplessness’ of the individual in a world dominated by powerful corporate economics. Damaging computers is his response to notions of a society that is both controlling and destructive, an act made in defiance of collective fear that the technologies we learn to crave are simultaneously enslaving us. Through artistic practice, Li Jingxiong addresses the brutality and tragedy of our virtual lives with the consequent psychopathologies of surviving contemporary life.

 

Li Jingxiong questions the sacrifice of tradition and social bonds in exchange for technological advancement. ‘Li’s work could be considered as a collection of ruins from an alternative fiction, rescued from the flux of social evolution, set against the background of Chinese reality, highlighting the aesthetic system of violence and social pessimism that the world is not concerned about’. Strongly alluding to notions of an apocalyptic future, the artist skillfully suggests that the dystopia we fear is already a reality in present-day China, where schools resemble factories and economic and political injustice result in oppression and brutality.

 

Li Jingxiong’s works have been exhibited at K11 Art Museum in Shanghai, the Goethe Institute Open Space in Shanghai, the Sifang Museum in Nanjing.