Liste Art Fair

Xper.Xr (born 1970) is a Hong Kong-based artist, performer, and provocateur belonging to the city’s first generation of experimental musicians. Coming of age against the backdrop of Hong Kong’s transformation into an affluent global business hub, he found his way to art and music only after extended dalliances with BMX biking, drag racing, and general juvenile delinquency. This spirit of reckless self-invention and disregard for authority suffuses his practice — which often seems to read as a perverse reaction to (or deconstruction of) prevailing norms of good taste.

Xper released his first cassette Murmur — arguably the first Chinese noise record — in 1989. During the same period, he exhibited paintings, staged happenings, and organized events at seminal artist-run spaces around the city — intersecting with now well-known figures such as Kwok Mang Ho and Zuni Icosahedron. Through these parallel activities as an independent organizer, Xper was instrumental in bringing many of those in Hong Kong’s cultural world their first taste of experimental cinema, noise music, and contemporary art. Characterized by a constitutional irreverence, deliberate courting of failure, and self-effacing aesthetic, Xper.Xr stands nearly alone as a regional representative of the radically individualistic and anti-authoritarian tendencies embodied by no-wave and noise culture. His practice represents a crucial moment of the city’s artistic counter-history which is long overdue for re evaluation.

Xper has exhibited his work at Quart Society, Empty Gallery, Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing, and the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, amongst other venues. Upcoming shows include The Cube, Taipei.