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Liu Wei was born in 1972 in Beijing, graduated from the China Academy of Art, and currently lives and works in Beijing. His practice spans a range of media, including painting, video, installation, drawing, and sculpture. His work contains incisive social satire and striking visual form, confronting the viewer with an ideological attack that surveys the social positioning of the individual.
Liu Wei’s new works address environmental degradation and the history of political machinations, using both temptation and revulsion to process the conditions of the city. He documents a surplus of affect that is countered with a state of anxiety, a treatment of encroachment and deprivation. This artistic production resides in a difficult category of indefinable aesthetic development, making them perhaps most legible in the context of a critique of the cultural industries.
Uprooted Obelisk is a new work dating from 2008. The figure of the obelisk, like the pyramid, is an architectural figure that emerged as a major symbol of ancient Egyptian civilization. Its defining construction is a pointed square column that tapers towards the top, ending in a pyramid. In this work, an obelisk eight meters tall has been pulled out of the ground and slowly rotated vertically into an upside-down position. The portion formerly underground is now clearly visible. As the audience is led to gaze upwards, following the lines of the obelisk, the sight of this inverted monument brings a sense of oppression—it is as if the whole monstrosity could come toppling down at any moment. As a symbol of cultic power, the obelisk has stood on the face of the earth for 3000 years; finally, it has been subverted. It has borne the weight of social migration, development, expansion, and invasion, the sins and glories of civilization—the revelation that these things could be uprooted opens a hotbed of instability formerly closed off by the shackles of ideology. This work induces a reconsideration of the deepest structures of value. Liu Wei’s reality may be ridiculous, but it also offers a strong potential for new insights.
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