Humans create value and transform life through their hands, aspiring to live poetically in the city. Meanwhile, cities become imbued with shared memories and emotions through the contributions of generations of laborers. Since the Reform and Opening-Up era, Dongguan has rapidly emerged as a pivotal manufacturing hub along China’s southern coast and an emerging first-tier city. As a native artist of Dongguan, Li Jinghu maintains a profound focus on material substances and forms. Throughout over two decades of artistic practice, he has consistently navigated and reflected within these realms, intertwining the notes of both the era’s and his personal destiny. This enduring exploration has enabled him to construct a unique spatiotemporal coordinate system within his artistic universe. 

Li Jinghu, through his profound insights into Dongguan’s urbanization, the memories of its residents, and societal transformations, employs his distinctive artistic language to interrogate the evolution of the era and the metamorphosis of the city’s urban fabric. The exhibition seeks to review Li’s recent artistic endeavors, offering an interpretation of Dongguan rooted in his personal narratives while fostering cross-regional cultural exchange. Additionally, the exhibition will debut a series of new works by Li. These creations not only signify groundbreaking shifts in his creative dimensions but also mirror, within the folds of time, the artist’s own trajectory of transformation and the concentric growth rings of the city’s development. Together, they interweave as mutual annotations, crafting a dialogic space imbued with temporal and spatial depth.

Li Jinghu’s artistic practice centers on the subject of urban mass production, transforming readily accessible everyday materials, particularly industrial ready-mades, into mediums of production that illuminate the underlying relationships between labor and consumption. In White Clouds, he assembles fluorescent light tubes, commonly used in factory ceilings, into a cloud-like form suspended above the lobby. The light that once illuminated the bodies of factory workers is reimagined as a poetic manifestation of collective experience. This interplay between materiality and natural imagery disrupts superficial perceptions of everyday life, resonating with the architectural concept of ‘Playful Valley’ at X Museum—a space that transforms industrial structures into a rhythm of wandering through landscapes, reimagined within an Eastern aesthetic framework. The materiality of Li’s works operates on two planes. In one sense, his materials serve as media intrinsically tied to specific socio-industrial contexts: mosaic tiles, frequently employed by the artist, resonate with southern China’s industrial history and urbanization, while Immortality, a sculpture of stacked fruits and vegetables, reflects the commodity-driven economy. In another sense, his materials possess a commensurable quality – The artifacts, through repeated arrangement, ultimately transform into accumulated emotions over time and are revealed.