A recent trip to the X Museum in Beijing, where two solos of Chinese artist Xing Wanli and German artist Alexander Basil are underway, provides visitors an experience seesawing between disarray and order, between noise and stillness, as well as between reality and fantasy.

On view at the museum's first floor are more than 40 paintings created by Xing since 2018. Using bold, expressive brush strokes, the artist painted against moody, mysterious backgrounds, figures with identities hard to pin down and objects such as a clunky, old home computer and fragments of its keyboard, which mystify and enchant the viewer while filling them with some sort of nostalgia.

Born in North China's Hebei province in 1992, Xing studied at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute and Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts. The Chengdu-based artist is into modern literature and has created a body of work inspired by British writer Joseph Conrad, American writer Thomas Pynchon and especially Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami.

For example, the Beijing solo features the artist's "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" series, whose title was borrowed from Murakami's 1985 eponymous novel. Also on show are paintings filled with the scenery and imagery that the artist extracted from Murakami's 1Q84, a three-volume novel published between 2009 and 2010, and tinted with his own understanding and memory.

While Xing's somewhat pandemoniac, magical realistic canvases invite the viewer onto a trip down memory lane or into the literary unknown, the work of Alexander Basil, on display at the museum's second floor, opens a window into the artist's private, intimate world and inspires visitors to turn inward and explore their true identity.

Greeting the eye are subdued colors such as brown, beige, and taupe, and compositions of mathematical beauty evocative of those of M.C. Escher. A bald, bearded man with rosy skin, curvy limbs, considered as the artist's self-portrait, populates almost every painting on show. The subject is often unclothed and portrayed in domestic environments such as in the kitchen, in bed, or in the bathtub, surrounded by everyday objects, including laptops, cellphones, mirrors, and tables.

What intrigues Chinese audience is that the subject seems to possess the super power of 72 bian (72 transformations) that Monkey King in the novel Journey to the West, has. His face humorously appears in the tip of a burnt match, in a lighter's dancing flame, or in a moth flying towards a bright light bulb which is also made of his face; his body can be as fluid as spilled wine from a glass or a puddle of water on the stove bench spilling from a boiling pot. Whatever form the figure assumes, he never loses his skeptical, defensive stare, like a gesture of defiance against the viewer's gaze or examination.

Born in Russia in 1997 and raised in Germany, Basil has studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. The X Museum exhibition marks Basil's debut in China.

The two exhibitions run through May 30. X Museum has rolled out a new ticket policy. Visitors can choose to pay X yuan (any amount above 10 yuan) to view the ongoing exhibitions.

If you go:

Monday to Sunday: 10:00-18:00 (last entry at 17:30)

X Museum, Langyuan Station, E1 (Building 10), No.53 Banjieta Road, Chaoyang district, Beijing