Xper.Xr

Xper.Xr (born 1970) is a Hong Kong-based artist, performer, and provocateur belonging to the city’s first generation of experimental musicians. After releasing Murmur (1989), arguably the first industrial noise recording in the territory, he went on to release and perform alongside such names as Otomo Yoshihide and Merzbow. Characterized by a constitutional irreverence, deliberate courting of failure, and self-effacing aesthetic, Xper.Xr.’s practice represents a crucial moment of the city’s artistic counter-history. From 2012 to 2015, he ran the seminal underground exhibition and performance venue CIA in Kowloon, organizing shows with like-minded artists Kago Shintaro, Vagina Dentata Organ, New Noveta, Hermann Nitsch, Laibach, and Olivier de Sagazan.

Xper’s first exhibition with Empty Gallery, Tailwhip (2021), presented a historical overview of the past three decades of his practice, including performance documentation, archival photographs, scores, props, and other ephemera. The following year, he debuted a new series of paintings in Bad Timing (2022). In October 2022, he opened his first exhibition in New York at Loong Mah, Cacophon.