Liu Wei

signed in Chinese and Pinyin, titled in English and dated 2008 on the reverse

Private European Collection

This work is generally in good condition. Having examined the work under ultraviolet light, there appears to be no evidence of restoration.
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Purple Air Above Beijing
Liu Wei

Liu Wei is indisputably the most successful young artist in China. His works speak in an international artistic vocabulary, and his vision boldly transcends regional boundaries to confront globalization boldly as an inescapable condition and explore the common concerns of the “global village.” The invitations that he has received from various Western art institutions suggest the international outlook of young Chinese artists, which is in stark contrast to their predecessors of an earlier generation. Created in 2008, the Purple Air H2 (Lot 1041) is from Liu Wei’s most important series of two-dimensional artwork. Its monumental but thoughtful composition and rich chromatic variations,  as well as the textured and vivid contrasts between the foreground mountain range and the pinkish red sky in the background—all these serve to articulate the complex, intertwined forces of life in Beijing’s urban environment. A full realization of the essence of the series, this painting has immense symbolic value.

The Purple Air series of oil paintings began in 2006. Liu Wei first creates the compositions on a computer and then enlarges it in paint on canvas. Replacing Beijing’s smoggy grayness with digital imagery is the artist’s attempt to recreate the capital’s urban environment. The lot on offer, Purple Air H2, is monumental in scale and juxtaposes a large gray mountain range against the backdrop of a red sky, which seems bathed in the warmth of dusk. Countless lines crisscross each other in front of the mountain range, some converging and others diverging, at once suggesting the skyscrapers of Chinese cities and visualizing concretely the digital data and pixels of the virtual world. Speaking about the Purple Air series, Liu Wei is explicit that his subject is Beijing: “There is an ancient Chinese saying about a place having “purple air,” that it is enshrouded in gray. In fact this means that the place is full of life. It has many problems but also much vitality at the same time.”¹  Purple Air H2 lets us enter the Beijing of Liu Wei’s mind, as well as intertwined truths and fictions taking place on its stage. As a young witness to China’s urbanization, Liu Wei captures this state of being through a shift in creative strategy. This is the significance of the Purple Air series.

In truth, Liu Wei’s art has always been rooted in China. This year, he was invited to exhibit at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. He designed a site-specific installation that contained the architectural structures characteristic of his art, composing boxes, desks, and walls in various materials to create complex and multilayered visual effects. More importantly, this work continued Liu Wei’s meditation on the rapid transformation of contemporary China. The architectural elements recall Chinese cities, while the mixing of materials give visual expression to their sociopolitical structures and internal disharmonies. In dialogue with the curator Noor Mertens, Liu Wei says, “This is reality. What ultimately is reality? And through what media is it constructed?”

A true Beijinger, Liu Wei was born in 1972 and graduated in 1996 from China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, which was formerly Zhejiang Academy of Art and has a strong tradition of trend-setting innovation. Liu Wei and other Academy artists collaborated on the exhibition “Post-Sense Sensibility,” a response to the excessive idealism of the 1980’s. They wanted to free themselves from the grand lessons of social responsibility and showcase a radically different kind of art. Liu Wei’s contribution was a video installation. Although the exhibition lasted only a day, it had a tremendous impact.

Liu Wei breaks away from traditional artistic language in his paintings, which, more than the work of an earlier generation, are influenced by Western conceptual art. Duchamp’s notion of the “ready-made,” Minimalism, and Deconstructionism have all left their traces in Liu Wei’s works.  Ranging widely in medium, creative strategy, and subject matter, these installations, sculptures, videos, and paintings at first may seem scarcely related to each other. Yet we can still sense the vague presence of a city and its inhabitants in his mid-career works, such as the famous Love it! Bite it! (2007) , China (2006), and The Outcast (2007). In them a social consciousness inheres, albeit in a concealed manner. Liu Wei is the most authentic observer of society. “The city is reality. All of China exists in a city under construction, which in the end has an impact on you. You cannot avoid paying attention to it. You wonder: why should one do this? It’s all related to the system.”²

Indeed, many of Liu Wei’s works from his middle period allude to the social system. Some of them are even explicitly political and contain unmistakable social satire and critique. In China of 2005, he assembles porcelain bowls into military weapons, in a barely veiled reference to the country famous for its“china.” Love it! Bite it! is an important series begun in 2006. Here he uses edible dog chews as his medium to construct installations of buildings of different cities, revealing that the urbanite’s desire for power is as untamed as a dog’s desire for food.  The same series also contains a controversial replica of the Potala Palace of Lhasa, a testament of Liu Wei’s daring criticality.

From the late 2000’s onwards, Liu Wei’s works have been invited to various large-scale exhibitions abroad, including the Venice Biennale of 2005 and the Lyon Biennale of 2007, and in 2008 he won a Contemporary Chinese Art Award (CCAA). At this time, his art underwent a change in direction, abandoning his earlier, more explicit satire and critique in favor of understated meditations on society. To open a new creative path, he returned to the formal aspects of art. In Purple Air series, for example, he replaced the painting brush with the computer mouse and painting with graphic design to explore the formal possibilities of painting. “I use a mouse to create all my paintings as an instinct and as a continuation of painting.” Purple Air was a milestone in Liu Wei’s conceptual reorientation, which also witnessed many installations of pastiches and juxtapositions. Doubtlessly as a representative major example of this series, the lot on offer, Purple Air H2, documents a crucial turning point in Liu  Wei’s career.

¹ Jerome Sans, Interview with Liu Wei, Duihua Zhongguo, 2009.
² Interview with Liu Wei, “I always keep myself in a state of instability,” XX Hans Ulrich Obrist interview with Liu Wei, Liu Wei, Trilogy, 2011.