Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, January 5, 2022: Liu Wei, a Chinese painter, sculptor, installation (#1462)

Liu Wei (1972) is a Chinese artist based in Beijing. He works in varied media – video, installation, drawing, sculpture, and painting.

His works include the Super Structure series of model cityscapes constructed from dog chews; the Purple Air oil paintings of stylised skyscraper cityscapes; the Landscape Series of landscapes made from photographic composites of human buttocks; and Indigestion II, a two-metre model turd.

He has shown work in exhibitions including 21: World Wide Video Festival in Amsterdam, Cinema du Reel at the Pompidou Centre in France, Over One Billion Served at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, and Between Past and Future at the International Center for Photography in New York City. His dog chew structures were in 2010 once again shown during the exhibition Dreamlands at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Liu graduated from China Academy of Art in Hangzhou in 1996. He stated that he "really began doing art after graduated." Between 1996 and 1998, he experienced a post-graduate period of transition in which he was producing idealistic oil paintings. In 1998 and 1999, he also began producing installation works as well as video projects. The majority of these video projects were related to the human body.He described these works as impulsive and intuitive; works of a still young and impulsive artist.

After graduation, he returned to Beijing, where he turned from painting to experiments in other types of media, such as videography. He participated in several DIY exhibitions while supporting himself as an editor at Beijing Youth Daily. In 1999, he was involved with a group of subversive artists known as the “Post-Sense Sensibility” group and participated in an exhibit known as “Post-Sense, Sensibility, Alienated Bodies, and Delusion.” Then in 2003, he was invited by Hou Hanru to participate in the Fifth Shenzhen International Public Art Exhibition, which was to be called “The Fifth System: Public Art in the Age of Post-planning.”

Liu began his career as a member of the subversive movement known as Post-Sense Sensibility. Art trends that had been popular in the early 1990s, such as Political Pop and Cynical Realism, seemed outdated and ineffective to many of the younger generation artists. Later in the 1990s, new art forms such as installation, performance art, video art, and conceptual photography were widely embraced and were used to demonstrate Conceptual art that came to dominate contemporary Chinese art. The 1999 show “Post-sense, Sensibility, Alien Bodies and Delusion” in Shaoyaoju, Beijing, was one that included artists from all over China, notorious for visceral sculptures of human and animal corpses, “borrowed” cadavers juxtaposed with stillborn fetus, severed human arms hanging from meat hooks, and the sounds of a goose, starving to death with its feet glued to the floor. The purpose of the exhibition was to create art that wouldn't be collected by Western audiences, which reveals the extent of resentment against Western powers. The young generation of artists accused foreign collectors of “plotting to control Chinese art.”

A particular constellation of ideas have been circulating within 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. His works present ideas of corruption, alienation, or the immense verticality of a megalopolis’s infrastructure. About the influence of the city on his art, Liu Wei has said, “Cities are reality; all of China is a city under construction, and of course this influences me.” He also has acknowledged that the reality of the city is powerful and that we “feel numbed most of the time.”

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. These works speak to the mass production and consumerism of modern society, using objects that represent the luxury of contemporary capitalist society. His use of everyday household objects and “readymades” also suggests a reinvestment in materials. The works demand that, even as new technologies and machines produce new and more ephemeral types of knowledge, humans acknowledge the forms of the everyday objects.

At Liu Wei's studio in Beijing, little of the artwork is performed by the artist. In 2006, Liu began hiring nearby villagers to assist with the artworks and the number of workers in his studio has continued multiplying. All of his artworks are now produced by teams of assistants and fabricators. Even Liu's representational paintings are digitally generated by the artist and then transferred to a canvas, where they are filled in by studio workers.

His artworks and installations are produced through a process of tinkering as workers add and manipulate the forms in a theatrical experience. He often revisits sculptures and installations, making significant alterations later on. His artworks are constantly in flux, morphing and changing, like any other form of matter.

After the Biennale, Liu Wei became a known figure in the world of contemporary Chinese art. In an interview with Barbara Pollack, Wei attributes his initial career success to Looks Like a Landscape. In the interview Wei said "This photograph changed my life and made it possible for me to live off my work".

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