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Lot Essay
'Art is suffering, and it is ineffable. Come to think of it, it may be best to turn [this suffering] into ideas and put them into paintings. That will stop us from ever deceiving ourselves.'—Liu Wei
Painted in 1991, Untitled is an iconic early work from Liu Wei’s Revolutionary Family series which projects a cynical attitude in profiling China’s social transformation in the 1990s. Graduated from China Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1989, Liu shared the same vision as many young artists of the time such as Fang Lijun: while they were disappointed by the failure of radical artistic experiments to change the country’s social reality in the 1980s, they were also actively searching for new paths. In 1993, Liu was invited to China’s New Art, Post-1989 co-curated by Li Xianting and Johnson Chang, an exhibition that toured internationally; his works were also featured in Passage to the East at the Venice Biennale. These invited showings highlighted his status as a pioneer of Cynical Realism in the 1990s. Produced only for three years, Liu’s Revolutionary Family series is seminal and extremely rare.
Drawing on everyday subjects and adopting a cynical attitude, the artist obliterates the heroic social realism of the past, as he uses comical and distorting brushwork to depict his friends and family. Liu’s father was a senior general in the military, and he enlists imagery of the military and soldiers in his earliest works. The Revolutionary Family series embodies the artist’s exploration of China’s ideological landscape.
In the foreground of Untitled are three short-haired men: the man on the left is an intellectual, who is topless and wearing glasses; the man in the middle has an uneven forehead, and his mouth is slightly ajar; the man on the left, whose figure is proportionately scaled down in the painting, is showing only half of his face and wearing a pair of army green trousers. What is intriguing is that despite their physical proximity, the three men appear oblivious to each other, and they pay no attention to the low-flying military guilder who is monitoring the public. Apart from using the military aircraft as a metaphor for military power, the artist boldly departed from the official aesthetics of the time in his painting style, abandoning socialist realism for a distorting brushwork that renders his subjects bizarre with an unorthodox touch.
Liu’s ‘grey’ humour awakens a distinctive spirit among contemporary Chinese artists, as it is an influence on other Chinese artists who seek breakthroughs in their styles. As one of Liu’s Revolutionary Family paintings, Untitled is a representative work of Liu’s early ‘Cynical Realist’ style, and it has been collected by internationally renowned institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Painted in 1991, Untitled is an iconic early work from Liu Wei’s Revolutionary Family series which projects a cynical attitude in profiling China’s social transformation in the 1990s. Graduated from China Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1989, Liu shared the same vision as many young artists of the time such as Fang Lijun: while they were disappointed by the failure of radical artistic experiments to change the country’s social reality in the 1980s, they were also actively searching for new paths. In 1993, Liu was invited to China’s New Art, Post-1989 co-curated by Li Xianting and Johnson Chang, an exhibition that toured internationally; his works were also featured in Passage to the East at the Venice Biennale. These invited showings highlighted his status as a pioneer of Cynical Realism in the 1990s. Produced only for three years, Liu’s Revolutionary Family series is seminal and extremely rare.
Drawing on everyday subjects and adopting a cynical attitude, the artist obliterates the heroic social realism of the past, as he uses comical and distorting brushwork to depict his friends and family. Liu’s father was a senior general in the military, and he enlists imagery of the military and soldiers in his earliest works. The Revolutionary Family series embodies the artist’s exploration of China’s ideological landscape.
In the foreground of Untitled are three short-haired men: the man on the left is an intellectual, who is topless and wearing glasses; the man in the middle has an uneven forehead, and his mouth is slightly ajar; the man on the left, whose figure is proportionately scaled down in the painting, is showing only half of his face and wearing a pair of army green trousers. What is intriguing is that despite their physical proximity, the three men appear oblivious to each other, and they pay no attention to the low-flying military guilder who is monitoring the public. Apart from using the military aircraft as a metaphor for military power, the artist boldly departed from the official aesthetics of the time in his painting style, abandoning socialist realism for a distorting brushwork that renders his subjects bizarre with an unorthodox touch.
Liu’s ‘grey’ humour awakens a distinctive spirit among contemporary Chinese artists, as it is an influence on other Chinese artists who seek breakthroughs in their styles. As one of Liu’s Revolutionary Family paintings, Untitled is a representative work of Liu’s early ‘Cynical Realist’ style, and it has been collected by internationally renowned institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.