4C Exhibition 2025 Q2 The Order of Chaos
Disintegration and reconstruction—order flows within disorder
Words by Liuxuan Lyu
The Order of Chaos traces the practices of eight artists, exploring the fluid equilibrium between fragmentation and renewal, deconstruction and reconstruction. They navigate the boundaries between structures, seeking order within disarray and introducing variations through reconfiguration. Perception becomes their language, generating new possibilities amid disorder.
This is a physical reshaping of form and a reconstruction of perception. From the ever-expanding urban landscape to personal memories sculpted by time and experience; from the material’s resistance under tension to the silent possibilities of breath and stillness as language—these works break established structures, redefining the shape of reality through experimental approaches.
Order is never static, nor is chaos an endpoint. In the fractures, in the unfinished, new possibilities quietly emerge.
Miaoyi Shu, Plant That Could Kill
Plant That Could Kill is an installation made of yarn, wool, and fabric, resembling a suspended neural network in space. At first glance, it appears loose and fragile, as if it might fall apart at any moment. Yet upon closer inspection, it reveals a hidden sense of order and self-balance. Using soft materials, the artist constructs a space that embodies “fragility,” allowing viewers to feel a subtle tension within the chaos.
The work breaks away from traditional modes of viewing. Its tangled, hanging threads guide the audience to walk around and observe from different angles—each movement reshaping the viewer’s relationship with the piece. This fluid viewing experience mirrors the structure of the work itself: unstable, yet never fully collapsing; delicate, yet persistently holding itself together.
Inspired by the imagery of “withered lotus and dead wood” in East Asian aesthetics, the artist does not aim for perfection. Instead, the work embraces brokenness and imperfection as a way to express traces of life. It becomes an abstract emotional body—gently knotting together experiences, memories, and feelings, and suspending them in space.
Within the context of the exhibition The Order of Chaos, this piece stands out as one of the quietest voices—not with a dramatic collapse, but with a soft unfolding. It invites us to reconsider whether fragility might also be a form of strength—one that, even in deconstruction, holds the potential for renewal.
Jiaqi Peng’s ceramic installation establishes a precarious yet dynamic balance between “order” and “chaos.” Composed of ceramics and bricks, the work brings together two seemingly opposing materials—ceramics being fragile and emotional, bricks being solid and rational. Juxtaposed, stacked, and compressed in unconventional ways, they form a structure that feels on the verge of tilting or collapsing. This unstable state draws the viewer into a space where “understanding” and “sensing” constantly intertwine.
The ceramic elements bear strong traces of handcraft and organic fluidity, resembling soft bodies or living forms suddenly frozen mid-growth. The bricks, inserted irregularly throughout the structure, are no longer mere supports but integral components of the work. Through this dialogue between materials, the artist responds to the exhibition The Order of Chaos—seeking order within disorder and rebuilding connections from fragments.
This piece lacks a clear center and offers no singular viewing angle. Each ceramic element carries its own posture and emotion, resonating with others within a system of fragile balance. Viewers are invited to engage actively, rethinking the meanings of structure, equilibrium, and perception. With a keen sense of intuition and material tension, Peng Jiaqi guides us to perceive new forms of order and possibility within a space on the brink of collapse.
Jiaqi Peng, YAN, Fruit, Ceramic Sculpture, 2024
Susie Luo, Behind Your Dream, Oil Painting, 2025
In Behind Your Dream, the artist constructs a complex and emotional visual universe where dreams, nature, and philosophy intertwine—echoing the theme of The Order of Chaos, which explores the presence of order within chaos. The piece acts like a dream generator, inviting viewers into a nonlinear journey of perception. Through layered forms and colors, it evokes those elusive, undefinable sensations that hover on the edge of consciousness.
Dominated by warm browns and yellows, the painting feels like a horizon that exists perpetually within a dream. Flowing lines, spirals, and void-like forms resemble neural networks, guiding the viewer’s gaze inward and awakening a deeper state of awareness. Elements such as water, mist, trees, metal, and skin weave together fluidly, shifting and transforming like dreamscapes—where everything can meet, merge, vanish, or be reborn.
Touches of blue and white punctuate the composition like moments of clarity within a dream, offering brief glimpses of sharp insight. Though densely composed, the painting maintains a sense of rhythm and order in motion. This structured fluidity reflects the artist’s philosophical view: nothing is fixed; everything is in flux, coexisting in an ever-evolving balance between dream and reality.
Behind Your Dream quietly poses a question: what lies behind a dream? Unspoken emotions? Unfulfilled realities? Or perhaps a presence that has yet to be named? Like a blurred mirror, the work doesn’t reflect appearances but reveals the emerging order and possibilities forming at the edge of chaos and reason.
Zhaoxiong Han’s No-stop Sharing series uses two sets of architectural models and design proposals to rethink the urban structures we often take for granted. Approaching from both horizontal and vertical dimensions, he challenges the traditional ideas of fixed centers and defined boundaries, proposing a more fluid, decentralized vision of the city.
In Infinite Expansion, urban space is no longer clearly divided into public or private, commercial or residential; instead, it unfolds like an organically growing network. Meanwhile, Infinite Stacking rejects the notion that buildings must only expand outward, experimenting instead with vertical layering to create multi-level, multifunctional living environments within limited space. Together, these works ask a central question: Can cities be shaped not by planners, but by the evolving needs of people?
Han treats architecture as a form of artistic expression, emphasizing that space is not merely a container for function, but also a vessel for emotion and relationships. He envisions the city as a living organism—elastic, adaptable, and capable of renewal. In No-stop Sharing, what appears chaotic on the surface is underpinned by intricate structural design, where each spatial node interacts with people, the environment, and even the city’s history.
This work directly responds to the core theme of the exhibition The Order of Chaos—finding order within disorder. Through architectural language, Han presents a more open and imaginative vision of the city, prompting us to reconsider our relationship with space: Can a city move beyond its concrete and steel framework to become a living, breathing entity that we shape, sense, and transform together?
Zhaoxiong Han, No-stop Sharing, 2D Digital Drawing, 2024
Xiaohan Luo, Number, Language & Sound
Moving Image , 2021
This video work is composed of sound, image, language, and silence, creating a sensory space charged with tension. Drawing from the artist’s own experience with hearing impairment, it captures sounds and silences that are often overlooked or difficult to articulate in everyday life, presenting a fragmented yet coherent “broken context.”
The fragments within the piece—blurred lip movements, flickering text, incomplete sounds—may appear chaotic, but they carry an underlying rhythm and logic. They invite viewers to feel the loss of communication and the limitations of language, while also uncovering a subtle yet genuine sense of order. This speaks directly to the central question of the exhibition The Order of Chaos: in the midst of disorder, can we find new ways to express ourselves?
By layering numbers, text, and images, the artist makes the invisible dimensions of “sound” visible, encouraging us to reconsider: What truly constitutes communication? When language fails, can silence itself become a form of voice?
This work is not only an exploration of sound and perception, but also a profound act of self-expression. Through its shifting visuals and fragments, it speaks in a gentle yet determined voice, inviting us to find our own sensory path and inner rhythm within the chaos and the silence.
Shibo Chan’s Breathing Language is a sound-and-technology-based installation that explores a new form of communication grounded in the act of breathing. Presented in a dim, open space with minimal equipment, the work draws the viewer’s attention to the auditory experience rather than visual elements. Using real-time sensors, the installation captures the participant’s breath patterns, translating the length and frequency of each breath into tones—long breaths correspond to lower pitches, while short breaths produce higher ones—creating a bodily-driven “language.”
The work questions the boundaries of language, asking whether an unconscious physical act—breathing—can itself become a form of expression. Its conceptual foundation echoes John Cage’s 1951 experience in an anechoic chamber, where he discovered that “silence” is in fact filled with the sounds of the body. Chan continues this lineage of sound art by focusing on the internal sound of the body—breath—and raises the question of whether, in our increasingly digitized and information-saturated society, we have overlooked the body as a carrier of meaning.
Breathing Language challenges our dependence on traditional linguistic systems, reminding us that the body itself is a complex and perceptive source of information. By turning the audience into both “generators” and “receivers” of this new language, the work offers an experience where breath becomes a powerful expressive medium. It opens up the possibility of a more essential and inclusive form of communication, suggesting that in an era where emotional expression feels increasingly difficult, we might find new ways of understanding one another—through the simple, shared act of breathing.
Shibo Chan, Breathing Language, 2024
Threshold Lab, Sweat for Generation, Installation, 2025
Sweat for Generation presents a direct and provocative examination of the hidden material and energy costs behind the AI systems we increasingly rely on in everyday life. This interactive installation incorporates the viewer’s physical labor into the mechanism of the artwork itself, requiring participants to generate electricity manually in order to power a single AI text generation request. In doing so, the artwork transforms “sweat” into both a literal burden and a symbolic critique of the cost of technological convenience.
At the center of the piece is a hand-crank-powered device connected to a small thermal printer. After several minutes of manual labor, the machine prints a mundane output: a standard “sick leave email template,” the kind one might routinely generate with AI at work. This stark contrast between effort and result invites reflection: while AI is used to simplify trivial tasks, we rarely consider how much energy and infrastructure is consumed in the process.
Through precise data visualization—such as “this output required 10,110 joules of energy”—the work makes the energy transformation process behind AI language generation tangible and open to critique. The printed “receipt” lists internal AI system terms like “token,” “access AI model,” and “sustain server operation,” drawing a visual analogy to familiar shopping receipts. This reinforces the idea of AI as a consumer good—one built on layers of energy consumption and human labor, rather than a costless, omniscient tool.
In the context of an exhibition focused on bodily participation and modes of communication, Sweat for Generation offers a sharply critical perspective: if language was once a simple, low-cost medium of human connection, has it now—through AI—become a high-cost form of technological consumption? By making the viewer’s labor a necessary component of the AI process, the piece transforms passive spectators into “digital laborers.” The physical exertion it demands is a visceral counterpoint to the invisible labor that powers our digital society. Through this act of making viewers “sweat,” the work becomes a compelling and ironic commentary on the unseen costs of convenience in the age of information.
In the exhibition The Order of Chaos, Zhang Xinyi’s Ferris Wheel series uses figurative painting to explore the complex relationship between history and reality. She transforms the familiar image of the ferris wheel into a powerful metaphor for cycles of fate and systems of constraint, imbuing her work with a deep sense of symbolism and emotional resonance.
In Ferris Wheel No.2, a woman in red hangs from the center of a massive wheel, suspended over a barren cliffside and a body of water. Fragile yet resilient, she seems caught within a suspended system—representing those trapped by institutional forces, enduring the weight of destiny without surrender. Here, the ferris wheel is no longer a site of amusement, but a structure of entrapment—symbolizing humanity’s perpetual spin within the mechanisms of power and time, a struggle without end.
Ferris Wheel No.6 shifts the focus to a collective plight: multiple nude figures are affixed to different points on the wheel. They are physically close, yet unable to truly connect. Each body appears frozen in a moment of resistance that can never fully unfold, exuding a quiet tragedy. These figures, ground down by silence, still hold a flicker of defiance.
Zhang’s paintings are charged with emotional intensity. She is not merely telling stories, but posing critical questions: Do we truly control our destinies? Her challenge extends beyond painting as a medium—she confronts artistic conventions, societal norms, and the passive role assigned to individuals. Inspired by the poet Liu Yong’s exile and Camus’ figure of Sisyphus, Zhang uses her brush as an act of resistance—a series of painted protests against fate.
Ferris Wheel echoes the exhibition’s central inquiry: can we find possibilities for change within rigid systems? Zhang Xinyi introduces “disorder” as a generative force, opening up cracks where personal awakening and new meanings can emerge. In her work, the ferris wheel is not an endpoint—it is the beginning of consciousness.
Xinyi Zhang, Ferris Wheel No.6, Oil on Canvas, 2024
The Order of Chaos presents diverse practices by eight artists, exploring the fluid relationship between fragmentation and renewal, chaos and order. Each work deconstructs and reconstructs form, challenging material conventions while reshaping how we perceive and express. Beyond formal experimentation, the exhibition invites reflection on the relationships between self, technology, and the world. As the title suggests, order is not static, nor is chaos an end point. Within fractures and unfinished forms, new possibilities quietly emerge—offering fresh perspectives for understanding the world and imagining the future.
Our Art Panel
