Liu Wei 刘韡

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Liu Wei刘韡 

Bio

Liu Wei was born 1972 in Beijing, China. From 1988 attended middle school affiliated to ChinaAcademy of Art in Hangzhou. In 1996 graduated from China Academy of Art. Currently lives and

works in Beijing. In 2006 Liu Wei received honorable mention in Chinese Contemporary Art

Awards (CCAA), in 2008 received CCAA Award for Best Artist and was nominated for the Credit

Suisse Today Art Award (2011).

He works in varied media  – video, installation, drawing, sculpture, and painting  – with no uniting

stylistic tendency. Conceptualism, satire, and humor are the hallmarks of his works.

In 1999, he was involved with a group of subversive artists known as the “Post-Sense Sensibility” 

group. Liu participated in an exhibit known as “Post-Sense, Sensibility, Alienated Bodies, and

Delusion”  in Beijing in 1999. Liu Wei’s  contribution to this exhibition was a multichannel video

called Hard to Restrain. In the video, naked human figures scurry around “like insects under a

spotlight". This exhibition that Liu Wei participated in along with Qiu Zhijie, Yang Fudong, Chu Yun

and Xu Zhen, is a very important group show that marked a turn in artist’s career.

In 2003, he was invited by Hou Hanru to participate in the 5th

 Shenzhen International Public Art

Exhibition. This was his first opportunity to create a solo project with an internationally known

curator. At the exhibition, he initially meant to procure and transport an airplane boarding bridge

to the exhibition site. However, the endeavor was too expensive and too ambitious and never

came to pass. This was his first encounter with “system” and its ability to impede on his work. He

has cited the mishap as a turning point in his artistic career towards a more pragmatic approach.

By 2006, Liu Wei began producing the kinds of works that would characterize his art for the next

decade: art concerned with objects of daily life and the systems that govern everyday existence.

Liu Wei is represented in China by the Courtyard Gallery in Beijing, in New York by the Jack Tilton

Gallery, and in Singapore by Asian Art Options.

Influences

Liu Wei’s major influences include Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp.

Themes

The city: Architecture and urbanism play a big role in Liu Wei's artwork since 2006. First, Liu has

used urban architecture and city landscapes in many of his works, such as Love it! Bite it! or Purple

 Air , and Outcast. Liu Wei’s city is ahistorical.

The Everyday: Liu Wei has produced artworks consisting of everyday “readymade” materials. Art

series such as Anti-Matter (2006) and As Long as I See It (2006) are composed of household

objects like washing machines, exhaust fans, and televisions, many of which have been altered, cut

out, or “blown apart” by some unspeakable force.

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Works

Liu Wei’s works have included his Super Structure series of model cityscapes and Love it! Bite it!

(2005-2007), a model of parliament buildings, both constructed from dried gut normally sold as

chew toys for dogs. With these works Liu Wei is mocking the grotesque consumption and

humanity’s  hunger for power. Comically editing down the world to only the ’tastiest’  bits, Liu’s 

utopian vision re-engineers the breadth of Western civilization as a carnivorous spectacle.

Perhaps his most important series in oil paintings Purple Air (2006-2010) portray stylized

skyscraper cityscapes. The title is an ironic reference, for the painting shows an urban landscape sotightly packed that it seems to have no air or life at all. Semi abstract paintings depict a cityscape

devoid of any hint of nature, where even the sky is stylized. The title is taken from the Taoist

scripture, where the term "purple air" denotes the original life force in the creation of the

universe.

Meditation (2010-2011)  is a more recent series of sculptural paintings that steamrolls its

predecessor’s poppy vertical lines into deeply furrowed slabs of gray oil paint. Gray, to Liu Wei’s 

mind, represents China: a monotone color that nonetheless requires a mixture of all the others toachieve it.

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Another important topic in Liu Wei’s  art is the re-exploration of China’s  landscape painting

tradition. His Landscape Series are made from photographic composites of human buttocks. In his

widely reproduced digital photo It Looks Like a Landscape (2004), raised bottoms and hairy thighs

pose as a range of hills.

Critics

Liu's work can be characterized by a post-Duchampian impulse associated with an expanded vision

of modernism. Liu works with deep sense of experimentation in a great diversity of media,

including photography, painting, sculpture and installation. In photography he has composed

landscapes out of human body parts with a conscious nod to John Coplans. He has also

transformed TVs, washing machines and other objects into strange, subtle and poetic works,

naming them "Anti-matter" and giving them a second life, constructing palaces out of old doors

and windows and making cityscapes out of dog chews that comments on a fragility of political

power. Parallel to all these highly inventive works are more settled paintings that make cross-

references to his object based art but are clearly founded on and integrated within the tradition of

modernist painting. Liu Wei has taken a special position within the international contemporary art

scene. He is an artist of his own time but he is not a part of an art movement. He belongs instead

to a tradition of artists who take up a clear individual position through their personal artistic

language, their humanistic scope and their deep socio-political commitment.

Gunnar B. Kvaran

Liu Wei's work exhibit composure and violence, absurdity and lucidity, concision and long-

windedness and numerous other peculiar combinations of mutually contradictory terms. His work

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fuses together cold, bewildering, fierce, fast and hard sensibilities to create a unique

temperament.

Gao Shiming

Exhibitions

2013 Lehmann Maupin, New York

'Expo 1/ New York', MoMA PS1, New York

Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates

2012 The 4th Guangzhou Triennial, China

‘Foreign’, Galerie Almine Rech, Paris, France

‘Inside the White Cube’, North Gallery, White Cube, London, UK

2011 Trilogy, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, China

2010 ‘DREAMLANDS’, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France

2009 ‘Breaking Forecast - 8 Key Figures of China’s New Generation Artists’, Ullens Center for

Contemporary Art, Beijing

2007 ‘China Power Station: Part II’, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo

The 9th Lyon Biennial, France

The Outcast, Universal Studios Beijing (now Boers-Li Gallery), BeijingLove It, Bite It, China Art Archives and Warehouse, Beijing

2006 Property of Liu Wei, Beijing Commune in association with Universal Studios Beijing

(now Boers-Li Gallery), Beijing, China

Purple Air, Grace Li Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland

2004 ‘China Now’, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Auction Record

A number of Liu Wei’s works have been sold in auctions from 2006 onwards. An average price for

Liu’s oil paintings was 150 000 USD. Photographs and prints were auctioned for an average of 50

000 USD.