Liu Wei

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

Galerie Hussenot, Paris
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: New Beijing in oriental Yijing
Liu Wei

 

Among the Chinese artists to have emerged in the 21^st century, Liu Wei is doubtlessly one of the most noteworthy. Colors, his current exhibition at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing and the largest solo show in his career thus far, is an ultimate exploration of artistic form and marks the rise of “Post-Sense Sensibility” group in contemporary Chinese art. As Liu Wei’s most famous creation, the Purple Air Series is centrally featured in Colors. Along with one of the exhibits at the UCCA, the lot on offer is one of very rare works in the series to feature a tree branch. The inclusion of this subject matter, common in traditional Chinese ink painting, at the UCCA highlights its importance for the artist. Especially remarkable is that the Purple Air Series on offer (created in 2008) is even larger and more imposing than the Ullens exhibit; it is truly a work of uncommon significance.

 

In Colors, Liu Wei gives an ultimate expression of visual creativity. Transcending traditional understandings of conceptual art and employing such tools as architecture, geometry, and space, he transforms the Great Hall of the UCCA into a single visual-sensorial installation, encouraging the visitor to sense, vaguely and yet clearly, the social context of this visual experience. From his experience as an urbanite, Liu Wei distills a unique set of visual elements; his artistic vocabulary is close to that of Minimalism, but is infused with the special, hybrid character of Chinese cities. Like other young artists participating in the show “Post-Sense, Sensibility, Alienated Bodies, and Delusion,” Liu Wei refused the exoticist gaze of the West on contemporary Chinese art and rejected the over-interpretation of “meaning” in conceptual art. Instead, he hoped for intuitive responses for viewers, demonstrating the young Chinese artists’ radically different artistic vision.

 

 

Created in 2008, the Purple Air F1 (Lot 1042) has an impressive and grand air and has a composition that is very rare in the series. Full of Asian flavour, a branch reaches from the right edge of the picture, echoing the elegant compositions of traditional Chinese ink painting. In the foreground are countless intertwined lines, some densely packed and others distant from one another. While evoking the skyscrapers of modern Chinese cities, these lines are also the concrete manifestations of the statistics and pixels of virtual worlds. The moon in the distance, adorned with the rightward reaching branch, juxtaposes the traditional Chinese mindscape and the complex cityscape of Beijing; urban chaos and organic life are inextricably linked, giving life to one another endlessly. A complete expression of the spirit of series, the Purple Air F1 is a highly representative work by Liu Wei.

 

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 greyness with digital imagery is the artist’s attempt to recreate the capital’s urban environment. The lot on offer, Purple Air F1, is monumental in scale and juxtaposes a large grey 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 visualising 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 grey. 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 F1 lets us enter the Beijing of Liu Wei’s mind, as well as interwoven truths and fictions taking place on its stage. As a young witness to China’s urbanisation, 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. Last 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 1980s. 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 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), 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 to Liu Wei’s daring criticality.

 

From the late 2000s onwards, Liu Wei’s works have been invited to participate in 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 favour of understated meditations on society. To open a new creative path, he returned to the formal aspects of art. In Purple Air F1, for example, he replaced the painting brush with the computer mouse and painted 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 F1 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 F1, 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,” Hans Ulrich Obrist interview with Liu Wei, Liu Wei, Trilogy, 2011