Liu Wei

Who is Liu Wei?

Liu Wei (Chinese language:刘韡） is an artist based in Beijing.

Liu Wei graduated from the China Academy of Art in 1996. He works in varied media – video, installation, drawing, sculpture, and painting – with no uniting stylistic tendency, though the Saatchi Gallery finds a uniting theme of "a sentiment of excess, corruption, and aggression reflective of cultural anxiety". Conceptualism, satire, and humor are the hallmarks of his works.

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

Liu Wei is represented by Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York. 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. His dog chew structures were in 2010 once again shown during the exhibition Dreamlands at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.