Liu Wei

Bio
Liu Wei was born 1972 in Beijing, China. From 1988 attended middle school affiliated to China Academy 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 Weis 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 artists 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 Weis 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 Weis 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.

Works
Liu Weis 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 humanitys hunger for power. Comically editing down the world to only the tastiest bits, Lius 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 so tightly 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 predecessors poppy vertical lines into deeply furrowed slabs of gray oil paint. Gray, to Liu Weis mind, represents China: a monotone color that nonetheless requires a mixture of all the others to achieve it.

Another important topic in Liu Weis art is the re-exploration of Chinas 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 crossreferences 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 longwindedness and numerous other peculiar combinations of mutually contradictory terms. His work

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 Chinas 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), Beijing Love 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 Weis works have been sold in auctions from 2006 onwards. An average price for Lius oil paintings was 150 000 USD. Photographs and prints were auctioned for an average of 50 000 USD.