Hive Center for Contemporary Art is pleased to present artist Xiong Haoqi’s upcoming solo exhibition, “Out-of-order”, at the Hive Becoming space in Shanghai from April 26 to June 18, 2024. Curated by Tang Yifei, this will be the forty-ninth presentation of Hive Becoming Program. The exhibition will feature the artist’s latest series of paintings.

Xiong Haoqi’s recent works reflect the process of re-establishing a structure with an introspective consciousness. Weaving layers of texture through figures, objects, and scenes, his paintings constitute a state of exceptionality concealed in the shadows between the visual twists and the extreme tension of points, lines, and planes. This kind of re-establishment that departs from the traditional methodology of painting, with coarse brushstrokes, complex perspectives and details urgently demanding to be recognised, presents everyday scenes with a sense of erratic chaos, almost like a silent outcry against a life of conformity – it addresses the routine of daily life that is marginally collapsing or sinking from an individual’s perspective, and in this way seeks to capture the slightest breach of the mental dilemma in the societal landscape.

Reflecting the artist’s creative nature and the methods of his paintings, “Out-of-order” presents a recollection of the adolescence to envisage another possible kind of growth beyond the potentially unsettled order, in an attempt to dissect the anxiety of contemporary life and to seek consolation. Here, “Out-of-order” becomes a metaphor – a paradigm of compliance within societal norms and the most mundane of daily routines, while beneath these façades Xiong conceals a self-serving dialectic of impasse and defiance. This corresponds to the palette and the setting of the images, where a perpetually dim sky and characters covered in sweaters in the midst of the bleakness seem to be situated in a time and space seam, in contrast to the brightness and warmth of the day. This exhibition constantly bounces between the first-person and the unconventional perspective of an observer, confronting or spying into the everyday life of the contemporary unrestrained adolescents, constructing bizarre and intricate visual snares into conflictual situations – only the pair of bright yet still ruthless eyes take shelter in the lost and curled-up body, revisiting the self and the other that once drifted in the process of growing up and attempting to imagine a possibility of remaining untamed. The rough texture in the painting boundlessly pervades the body and the occupied space, accumulating a viscous membrane on the flattened image, repeatedly disrupting and connecting the composition, where the brushstrokes with alternative vitality continuously growing and weaving in every crevice. These new experiments and investigations of Xiong’s painting structure serve as an attempt to transcend the “order” of painting, and to achieve a new kind of balance in the wake of breaking the aesthetic parameters of solace.