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Lot Essay
Liu Wei's art is an indicator of the values of the post-1990s Chinese generation. They reflect the political, economic, and cultural changes and reconstructions happening in a rapidly changing society.
The depiction of the flower in No Smoking Series: Flower (Lot 4) borrows from traditional Chinese bird-and flower genre in literati paintings. The flower at the centre is rendered in his signature feverish strokes that morph into Liu's signature symbols of "carnal flows". It is covered with flesh-like expositions of color and forms that evoke unrecognizable organic forms that resemble animal organs or distorted vegetables, with graffiti scrawl of childlike, plaintive assertions. Through this, Liu juxtaposes the binary of fertility and poverty, the refined and the coarse, the fair and the foul, and even, life and death.
The comic grotesquery of Liu's figuration of the human head in Portrait (Lot 6) suggests not only the corrupt trappings of contemporary existence, but embodies the experience itself as something that is humbled by its failings, ugliness, and inevitable dissolution. Deliberately provocative, iconoclastic and irreverent, Liu's work is broadly conceived, rooted in the fundamental concerns of art as well as the nature of existence.
As such, Liu Wei's works represent the consolidation of themes and practices that result in increasingly private expressions that is rich with personal symbolisms. These paintings can be seen as an indirect and ironic social commentary of contemporaneity.
The depiction of the flower in No Smoking Series: Flower (Lot 4) borrows from traditional Chinese bird-and flower genre in literati paintings. The flower at the centre is rendered in his signature feverish strokes that morph into Liu's signature symbols of "carnal flows". It is covered with flesh-like expositions of color and forms that evoke unrecognizable organic forms that resemble animal organs or distorted vegetables, with graffiti scrawl of childlike, plaintive assertions. Through this, Liu juxtaposes the binary of fertility and poverty, the refined and the coarse, the fair and the foul, and even, life and death.
The comic grotesquery of Liu's figuration of the human head in Portrait (Lot 6) suggests not only the corrupt trappings of contemporary existence, but embodies the experience itself as something that is humbled by its failings, ugliness, and inevitable dissolution. Deliberately provocative, iconoclastic and irreverent, Liu's work is broadly conceived, rooted in the fundamental concerns of art as well as the nature of existence.
As such, Liu Wei's works represent the consolidation of themes and practices that result in increasingly private expressions that is rich with personal symbolisms. These paintings can be seen as an indirect and ironic social commentary of contemporaneity.