The art of Liu Wei chronicles the major trends of development of Chinese contemporary art. Having partaken in the New Art from China, Post-89 exhibition, which toured Hong Kong and Sydney, Liu made a place for himself in international biennials throughout 1993 to 1996, achieving a worldwide impact abreast other forerunners like Zhang Xiaogang, Fang Lijun and Mao Xuhui. He was among the very few who participated consecutively in the 1993 Venice Biennial, the 1994 Sao Paulo Biennial, and, again, the 1995 Venice Biennial, landmark exhibitions that established Chinese contemporary art in the international art scene. In his most acclaimed series, the Revolutionary Family paintings, produced in the early 1990s, Liu eschewed the urge towards grand symbolic narratives of the nation and focuses instead on the his own family in order to reveal the day-to-day mentality and lived experience of modern men. His style of expression - at once frank, sentimental and facetious- is later dubbed "Cynical Realism", a powerful movement in Chinese art aligned with "a cultural tendency to kick against the fray of modernism" (Liu Wei, Red Bridge Gallery, Shanghai, China, 2008, p.44). As such, his works demonstrate a concern for society and, more remarkably, the inner being and self-reflection of an individual, a concern which additionally corresponds to the expression of human temperament central to traditional Chinese literati painting. This pursuit becomes the essence of Liu's art, found in virtually all his great canvases. Notwithstanding his persistence in articulating spiritual experience after the Revolutionary Family series, the artist, beginning around 2000, found himself artistically blocked. Between 1999 to 2000, his output was severely curtailed. Mulling over his own life and spiritual development, he felt confused and exhausted. Out of this period of difficult emotional introspection, Liu painted Who Am I? in 1999, which encapsulates his forlornness and agitation with a depiction of the nullified, inherently transient quality of life. It was through this period of introspection and experimentation that Liu found the essential value of Chinese traditional culture and philosophy and its capacity for both soothing and expanding one's inner being. The shan-shui paintings of Mi Fu, Bada Shanren and Tung Yuan are particularly illustrative of this traditional spirit of art. They reflect a uniquely Chinese perpective on nature and life. In the past, the literati might retreat into nature in order to find peace in times of crisis; by waxing lyrical over the landscape, they sought meditation and spiritual reinvigoration. In the contemporary context, traditional shan-shui, literally "mountain and water", becomes landscape and scenery, and Liu's depiction of them embodies a cultural passion and ideal that comes close to the way the Chinese literati had previously immersed themselves in shanshui. In this way, Liu recaptures the value of traditional culture by which he brings to life a series of landscapes after 2000. In these works the artist imitates traditional shan-shui paintings with a reshaping of the natural environment, communicating the distinct sentimentality of Chinese shan-shui to a contemporary audience. For Liu, this was a conscious restitution and adoption of the Chinese artistic tradition. Created with this revitalization of tradition and philosophy in mind, Landscape (Lot 1050), which draws on the traditional Chinese mode of representation in the form of Western modern oil, is one of the most significant of Liu's works, as it marks the genesis of his powerfully expressive brushwork and approach to spatial composition and thus a new stage of his artistic development.

Landscape depicts a far-off, broad scene extending to a deep horizon. Employing the construction of perspective space common to Western art, a rugged path extends from the center of the horizon, sketchily advancing to the foreground and darwing the audience into an infinite space of imagination. The atmosphere exuded from the work, however, resembles that of Chinese shanshui paintings: the undulating layers of colors on the horizon and along the sides of the path are reminiscent of the hummock and lake in traditional landscapes. Akin to Guo Xi's Old Trees, Level Distance, the level-view composition of this work enriches contemporary landscapes with a spatial structure representative of Chinese shan-shui. In Landscape the artist drops his earlier vibrant style of coloring and puts to use gray, black and white as the primary tone of the work, which additionally brings forth a sense of obscurity and vacuum evocative of the misty, nebulous and impenetrable mood of the Chinese ink-wash landscapes. Liu's use of color has always carried an expressionist touch; Do You Like Me?, for example, reveals the innate lust and worldliness of human beings in garish, loud pink. The large spread of grayish white in Landscape submerges the canvas in a sea of subdued silence, transmitting voicelessly an indescribable feeling of emptiness and bleakness. It seems to have transported us to confront the boundless world, where we are at once emptied of emotional and reinvigorated with a new energy to stride forth in the world again.
Chapped and dissolved, the grayish white pigments give the visuality of ink-wash that winsomely disperses and diffuses over the canvas. They evoke the seemingly limpid texture of Chinese paintings, allowing us to see through the work and be drawn into the meditative, vacant and serene realm singular to Chinese art. This quasi-textural brushwork blurs the boundary of colors, thereby delivers an indeterminate, enigmatic impression similar to that of contemporary German artist Gerhard Richter. Like Richter, Liu takes on the technique of artistic deformation, transforming the objective "nature" to the subjective, sentiment-steered "landscape". "Nature" and "landscape" are two distinct aesthetic concepts; while nature exists independent of human awareness, a landscape is projected and chosen. As we look at and recreate fragments of nature with our own perspective and emotion, "landscape" becomes the vehicle of sentiment, reflecting our state of mind and the moment of our existence within a specific space and time. It is from this conceptual premise that Liu creates Landscape, through which he seeks, as he always did, to express his own disposition and mentality. Just as Richter stirs up our unconscious and our imagination, Liu recounts his thoughts on life, his grief and his spiritual unrest via his landscapes. This mawkishness is reiterated by the shadowy image of a skull, which floats in the middle of the canvas. A symbol of death so frequently used in this period, it reveals the struggle and anxiety the artist then endured.

Liu's idiosyncratic white lines run all over the frame. The artist, when applying these lines, dilutes the pigments into a thin paste so that they flow freely over the canvas, loading the otherwise barren landscape with a dynamic energy. This kind of brushwork, which resembles the splatter-drips of Jackson Pollock and the sentimental lines of Cy Trombly, is remarkably expressionist. At this stage, the works of Liu are generally a descendent of this particular breed of expressionism, fully in dialogue with artists in the same lineage. Compared to Pollock and Trombly, the lines of Liu are more gossamer and unaffected; they bear the flavor of Chinese art, calling to our mind the motion of the throbbing brush and the pulsating placidity and thrill of the artist. It becomes the unique brushing style of Liu. For him lines are more than a tool to shape and define; they possess emotion, and they express a spiritual realm. When these angular lines curl and coil, the work is filled not only with vim and vigor but also dignity and nobility, which, to the artist, serve as testimony to the meaning of his life and human existence in general.

Since 1998 when Liu began painting landscapes, the notion of "landscape" has been the primary orientation and inspiration of his art. His meditation on "landscape" soon brought him to another pinnacle after the Revolutionary Family series, giving birth to works like the Flower and Fruit Series and Animal Series around 2006. All these demonstrate the way Liu breaks free from mainstream: when most Chinese contemporary artists focus on political and social reflection, Liu takes the step to guard against and reform the aesthetic traits and spiritual world of traditional Chinese literati painting, allowing us to look afresh at life and nature from the vantage point of Chinese culture and experience its inspirational influence over contemporaneity. The profound meaning and value of Liu's Landscape series lie exactly on such transcendence over artistic norms and traditions.