Artist Liu Wei @ Lehmann Maupin, New York

Liu Wei
Lehmann Maupin, New York
November 2 – December 17, 2016

Liu Wei Studio, Beijing

Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.

Lehmann Maupin announces an exhibition of new work by Liu Wei. The gallery’s second exhibition with the Chinese artist will be shown in both its New York locations. Each space will feature an installation alongside new paintings in which Liu Wei continues his examination of the physiological and psychological conditions that shape reality.

Over the past two decades, Liu Wei has resisted commitment to a specific medium or way of making, choosing instead to work with a wide range of media that facilitates the conceptual nature of his work. While many of his paintings, sculptures, installations, and videos reference Chinese culture and its modern landscape, his focus lies in universal issues affecting contemporary society, such as the transformative effect of urbanization on the landscape and unbalanced hierarchies of authority. Liu Wei approaches these concepts with an open mind, without imparting a particular political line of thinking. As part of the post-Mao generation, the artist has expressed how the rapid development of China and the constant shifting of ideology and values created an uncertain state of reality, which has deeply informed his artistic pursuits. Central to Liu Wei’s practice is his manipulation and alteration of perception as a tool to create environments where viewers encounter a complex and varied existence.

For his sculptural installation at 536 West 22nd Street, Liu Wei was inspired by the Jorge Luis Borges poem Mirrors (1960), particularly the segment that reads, “...Everything happens and nothing is recorded, In these rooms of the looking glass….” The monumental sculpture—comprised of mirrors that form a single, floating box—passes through walls and blocks off established pathways of the gallery as a way to drastically alter the existing architecture and the experience of the space. For Liu Wei, the presence of the viewer, who will be able to circumnavigate the box, is as important to the installation as the physical and material characteristics of the sculpture. The piece is intended to provoke a phenomenological experience of space that can be only activated by the viewer.

Architecture has long been a source of inspiration for the artist, as one of the defining characteristics of both modernity and urbanism. This is echoed in the gray monochromatic paintings also installed at West 22nd Street. The thick, tactile impasto of oil paint applied like rough plaster to the canvas recalls industrial building materials, while a series of metal bars installed in front of the paintings creates a visual and conceptual disruption to the viewing experience. This metal barrier, like the mirrored sculpture, provides a framing structure for the paintings, while also activating the viewer’s awareness of their physical presence within the space, as a consumer of visual information.

At Chrystie Street, Liu Wei builds upon his concern for activating space with a complex installation composed of objects made from military canvas, metal, and wood. Surrounding the installation is a series of colorful, irregularly shaped paintings on steel that resemble views of the horizon. This entire installation is intimately linked to Liu Wei’s fascination with the ways technology has enhanced and altered our understanding of the world. His representation is fragmented and disjointed in a way that mimics how we receive and process information. Liu Wei’s work suggests that the illusion of a panoramic view of the world drastically alters our own perception of reality, which is no longer simply informed by our immediate locale.

LIU WEI (b. 1972, Beijing; lives and works in Beijing) graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts, Hangzhou in 1996. Liu Wei’s work has been featured in international exhibitions, most recently at the Qatar Museum, Doha (2016); Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2016); PLATEAU, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2016); the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2015); the Rubell Collection, Miami (2014); Long Museum, Shanghai (2014); Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai (2011); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010); National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2010); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2010); Long March Space, Beijing (2010); Saatchi Gallery, London (2008); Bonniers Kunsthall, Stockholm; and Mudam Luxembourg, France (2008), to name a few. He has participated in numerous international biennials, including the 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016); 3rd Aichi Triennial, Nagoya (2016); 13th Biennale de Lyon (2015); 11th Sharjah Biennial (2013); 4th Gwangju Triennial (2012); 8th Shanghai Biennial (2010); 6th Busan Biennial (2008); 3rd Guangzhou Triennial (2008); and 51th Venice Biennial (2005). In 2016, Liu Wei was awarded the Atron AAC Award, Artist of the Year.

LEHMANN MAUPIN
www.lehmannmaupin.com

Liu Wei at Lehmann Maupin, New York

Liu Wei
Lehmann Maupin, New York
February 28 – March 23, 2013

Liu Wei

Merely a Mistake, II, 2009-2011

doorframes, wooden beams, acrylic board, and stainless steel, dimensions variable.

Installation image from the Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai

Lehmann Maupin presents the first solo exhibition of Chinese artist Liu Wei’s work in the United States, on view at 540 West 26th Street from 28 February through 23 March 2013. The exhibition will feature an amalgamation of multi-media works created over the past year in the artist’s studio in Beijing. Three large-scale assemblages constructed from salvaged demolition debris, a continuation of the artist's Merely a Mistake series begun in 2009, will be the centerpieces of the installation in the main gallery space.

Liu Wei will be present for an opening reception on Thursday, 28 February from 6 to 8 PM.

Considered to be one of the most progressive and original Chinese artists to have emerged on the international art scene, Liu’s work has evolved over the past 15 years into a layered conceptual approach that transcends medium and material. Working across painting, sculpture, photography, installation and video, Liu is relentless in his pursuit of truth and engagement with reality. His exploration of urban life stems from the accelerated urbanization afflicting his immediate cityscapes and the instability of a rapidly changing society. Of the times, Liu has said, “We grew up when things were constantly changing and nothing seemed stabile. There was a turnaround in values every couple of years…. Today you’d believe in one thing and tomorrow you’d believe in something completely different.”

Critical of the systems on which contemporary society is structured, Liu employs whatever medium or technique is best suitable to call into question the fixed notion that there is one way to understand the world and one way to act. In his catalogue essay for Liu Wei: Trilogy presented in 2011 by Shanghai’s Minsheng Art Museum, Gunnar B. Kvaran writes:

Acutely aware of his place in history, but also concerned with breaking tradition, Liu intermingles artistic inventiveness and an engagement with serious social and political questions, inviting the public to take part in intersubjective relationships. He does so through a symbolic constellation of objects, created out of unexpected materials and placed in surprising configurations, that deal with universal topics such as power and politics, society and identity, history and memory, art and philosophy, or with more abstract notions like time, unpredictability, change and illusion.

Kvaran goes on to say that “each of his works is like a vessel loaded with intelligent and meaningful reflections on the human condition, and the power of his art lies in the originality of the forms, objects, materials, and narrative structures that he brings together.”

Lehmann Maupin’s exhibition highlights new work from the various series for which Liu has gained notoriety, including Exotic Lands, Jungle, China, Merely a Mistake, Beyond the Sky Limits, Truth Dimension, and Colors. The abstract imagery of his Truth Dimension and Colors paintings recall the vast skylines of the world’s metropolises, their vertical urban sprawl unfolding frenetically across horizontal panoramas; in sharp contrast, the muted bands of color in Beyond the Sky Limits appear as quiet ruminations on the natural landscape. For Liu, an engagement with architecture is a reoccurring thread, and the reclaimed doorframes, wooden beams and metal bolts that constitute Merely a Mistake take the form of pointed arches and flying buttresses, reminiscent of Baroque and Gothic architecture. Installed side-by-side, as opposed to grouped by series, the nearly two-dozen works on view form a collective reading of a profoundly complex artistic practice.

LIU WEIL (b. 1972, Beijing, China) graduated from the China Academy of Art in 1996, and came of age with the younger generation of Chinese artists showcased in the ground-breaking 1999 “Post-Sense Sensibility” exhibition in Shaoyaoju, Beijing. His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions around the world, most recently in a solo exhibition at the Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai (2011), as well as at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010), National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2010), Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2010), Saatchi Gallery, London (2008), Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2008), and Mudam Luxembourg, Luxembourg (2008), among others. He has participated in numerous international biennials, including the Shanghai Biennial (2010), the 6th Busan Biennial (2008), the Guangzhou Triennial, (2008), and the 51st Venice Biennial (2005). He received the Chinese Contemporary Art Award for Best Artist in 2008, and was nominated for the Credit Suisse Today Art Award in 2011. The artist currently lives and works in Beijing.

LEHMANN MAUPIN
www.lehmannmaupin.com

Liu Wei & Ai Weiwei at Faurschou Foundation, Beijing

Liu Wei & Ai Weiwei: Works from the Collection
Faurschou Foundation, Beijing
13 October 2011 - 26 February 2012

The current show at Faurschou Foundation is the first show of works from the Faurschou Foundation collection, and thus marks the transition from commercial gallery to art foundation that Faurschou has now undergone. With the establishment of Faurschou Foundation, Luise and Jens Faurschou are realizing a long-held dream of devoting all their time, skills and networks to expanding and developing their collection of contemporary art, and creating exhibitions of a high international standard, both at the existing premises here in Beijing, and at the new exhibition space in Copenhagen which will open next year in September with a solo show by Cai Guo-Qiang.

In the future the exhibitions at Faurschou Foundation in Beijing and in Copenhagen will take their point of departure in the collection, and Luise and Jens Faurschou will be creating new exhibitions in collaboration with some of the best contemporary artists, curators, museums and galleries all over the world. For many years it has been the dream of Luise and Jens Faurschou to focus on the collection and its development, and the possibility of showing it. On the basis of the results and the collection created over the years, it has now become possible to realize this dream.

Faurschou Foundation currently presents works from the collection by Ai Weiwei and Liu Wei.

Entering the gallery the viewer is almost walking into Map of China, a large sculpture made out of Iron wood (Tieli wood) that Ai Weiwei has collected from dismantled temples of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

Many of Ai Weiwei's works from the past decade are made of local materials and of antique Chinese objects, Neolithic pottery, tables and chairs from the Ming and Qing Dynasties, wood, doors and windows from demolished temples and traditional houses, freshwater pearls, tea, marble, stone, bamboo etc. - 'ready-mades' trans¬lated into a conceptual, post-minimalist idiom.

Ai Weiwei points to the loss of culture by transforming the historical objects into something new - into moving and highly sensual contemporary artworks which thanks to their aesthetic beauty recirculate the meaning and history of these valuable cultural artifacts in the context of contemporary China.

From his recent grand-scale installation at TATE Modern in London earlier this year a field of porcelain handmade Sunflower Seeds covers the floor.

At TATE Modern Ai Weiwei installed a 100-ton thick layer of sun¬flower seeds on the floor - 100 million seeds - all made of porcelain produced and painted by hand in Jingdezhen.

The number of seeds is overwhelming, and yet 100 million is not even that many in the Chinese context. It is precisely in China that it is possible to produce such a labour-intensive work - and the work is very much about the relationship between the mass and the individual, and about China's increasing dominance in the world economy.

Sunflower Seeds is an incredibly beautiful, poetic work, simple, and with many layers of meaning connected to Chinese history.

Ai Weiwei has in the past years been engaged in the loss of lives after the Sichuan Earthquake. Namelist of student earthquake victims found by the citizen investigation, 2008 - is the names of students who died in the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. The list has been collected by the citizen investigation volunteers. The date for the work is open ended as not all the identities of the students have been found out. Some names are not able to be found as entire families have disappeared after the earthquake. The government has never revealed the full list of victims of the earthquake, but only a number. The citizen investigation volunteer's aim is to give each number a name.

In the second part of the exhibition space - Don't Touch by Liu Wei hangs suspended from the ceiling.

Composed of sewn together ox-hides, Liu Wei's rendering of the Potala Palace in Tibet, Don't Touch, is the largest work to date from the artist's series of sculpted dog chews representing a disarray of global headquarters. The mock-ups demonstrate Liu Wei's early interest in questions of power, the relationship between landscape and architecture and the material condition of the visual.

Standing higher than any other palace in the world at over 3,700 meters above sea level, the Potala Palace is a conspicuous but almost passé religious, political, and cultural symbol, presented to the world with pride and yet a stain on the reputation of many. Perhaps dispelling politicization, perhaps creating a fantastical pseudo-religious object, perhaps pointing to a dystopian mutation stemming from a larger social lack of spiritual direction, we can't be sure. But Liu Wei "lets it hang", and advises, irony intended, "Don't touch".

FAURSCHOU FOUNDATION

www.faurschou.com