Welcome to “Liu Wei: Colors.” In this constellation of new works, specially organized for this Great Hall, you will see the key ideas that Liu Wei’s art has explored over the past fifteen years distilled to a radical purity. You will watch a common formal language of space and material emerge across a focused sprawl of disparate objects and mediums. You will find yourself in an immersive environment, an occupied city, where visitors can never quite get around, or away from, the works on view. Looking closely, you may discern traces of the industrial systems and labor relations that gave rise to these objects. If you already know Liu Wei’s art, you might discover in this landscape both a summary of his work to date and a blueprint of where he might be headed.

Liu Wei was born in Beijing in 1972 and trained as a painter at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou in the 1990s. He belongs to the generation of artists who began their careers amidst the flourish of visceral work and underground exhibitions that bookended the turn of the millennium. In the years since, he has become a singular presence on the global art stage, known for crystallizing the visual and intellectual chaos of China’s myriad fraught transformations into an artistic language as versatile as it is distinctive. Incised sheet metal, hastily welded barriers and frames, a maze of taut-canvas shapes, a seamless wall of LCD screens showing only gradient hues, a warren of precisely jagged mirrored surfaces, vast piles of books sawed to look like stone, and of course, monumental paintings that originated as digital compositions and were completed by many toiling hands: This is Liu Wei’s aesthetic universe, both of, and slightly removed from, this particular time and place. These are the colors that Liu Wei sees.

“Liu Wei: Colors” is curated by UCCA Director Philip Tinari with Assistant Curator Guo Xi. The exhibition is supported by the Liu Wei Leadership Circle: Long March Space, Lehmann Maupin New York Hong Kong, and White Cube. CP and WTi Group are the new media art production partner. Chronus Art Center is the new media art partner. The exhibition publication is supported by the H2 Foundation for Arts and Education Limited.

About the Artist

Liu Wei (b. 1972) was born and currently resides in Beijing. He graduated from the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, in 1996. His recent solo exhibitions include: “Sensory Spaces 4” (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2014); “Density” (White Cube, London, 2014); “Liu Wei Solo Show” (Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, 2013); “Liu Wei Solo Show” (Long March Space, Beijing, 2012); and “Trilogy” (Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, 2011). His first solo exhibition was held at Courtyard Gallery, Beijing (2005).

Select international group exhibitions include: “Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915-2015” (Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2015); “28 Chinese” (Rubell Family Collection, Miami, 2013); “Shanshui: Landscape in Chinese Contemporary Art” (Lucerne Museum of Art, 2011); “DREAMLANDS” (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2010); “Breaking Forecast: 8 Key Figures of China’s New Generation Artists” (UCCA, 2009); “China Power Station: Part III” (Mudam Luxembourg, 2008); “China Power Station: Part II” (Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, 2007); “Art for Sale” (Shanghai Plaza, 1999); and “Post-Sensibility: Alien Bodies and Delusion” (Shaoyaoju, Beijing, 1999), among many others.

Liu Wei has participated in the 51^st Venice Biennale (2005), the 9^th Lyon Biennial (2007), the 6^th Busan Biennale (2008), the 4^th Guangzhou Triennial (2012), and the 11^th Sharjah Biennial (2013). He received the Chinese Contemporary Art Award for Best Artist 2008 and was nominated for the Credit Suisse Today Art Award 2011.

Download “Liu Wei: Colors” exhibition booklet and press release.