The use of accumulated lines in Liu’s paintings create a dissolute image which, in these paintings, results in forms that evoke futuristic towers, graphic screens, and circular, glowing neon suns or moons. Abstracted under a haze of simulated colour, the lines effect a compression and extension of pictorial depth which, as the artist has remarked, ‘re-establishes a unique visual structure and an order of gaze’. Likening his pictorial language to the ‘disorder of data’ on an electronic screen as well as to collage, Liu makes parallels between the layering process of his paintings and the constructive growth of the contemporary city:

‘A collage itself is the main way of composing modern cities, architectures and buildings. It is no longer a painting concept in the traditional sense, but is about construction, composition and movement between city and architecture, architecture and painting, painting and personal experience, where different interfaces, or images or screens, are created, reflecting a speed and a real landscape of modern living.’

This landscape of modern living is equally reflected in Microworld NO.7, 8 and 9 (all 2022), three sculptures from the ‘Microworld’ series which Liu began in 2018. Continuing his focus on the relationship between humans, nature and machines, the sculptures are executed in polished sheet aluminium, their smooth, amalgamated, composite forms eliding the organic, sensual and bodily form with the technological, mechanical and futuristic structure. Grounded in the philosophy of the French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist Bruno Latour, particularly his investigations into the relationship between humans and nature, the ‘Microworld’ sculptures point to our need to make associations between the organic and the manmade, while at the same time, harness a malleable response to new technology and to the possibilities it might engender.

Embodying a different kind of privileged gaze, Liu’s baroque forms evolve from the idea of the smallest units of matter; the fundamental components of our world, as seen through the most advanced scientific and optical tools. Exploring notions of the visible and invisible in our current state of technological advancement, they are both expanding and self-completing, combining sheets with solid forms and arcs and folds with weighty spheres. Hard-edged in their material properties yet presenting as soft undulating forms, Liu’s sculptures contain, describe and enfold space, their reflective skin-like surfaces asserting a physicality resonant of the body.

The minute building blocks for a new world here enlarged and made monumental, the ‘Microworld’ sculptures highlight the increasingly manipulated relationship between humans and nature, and our determined quest for technological progress. ‘We can’t truly experience this micro-world, but somehow we are, unquestioningly, convinced of its existence’, Liu has said. Responsive to the globalisation and cultural homogenisation of today’s world, Liu’s work provokes and entices, posing powerful questions which can be thought and felt through their sensory materiality and elusive form, allowing us, as the artist suggests, to ‘see through the prism of feelings’.

Liu Wei was born in 1972 in Beijing, where he lives and works. His solo exhibitions include Long Museum, Shanghai (2020); Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland and Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio (2019); Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2016); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2015); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2014); Today Art Museum, Beijing (2011); and Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai (2011).

Group exhibitions include Busan Museum of Art, South Korea (2020); Smart Museum of Art and Wrightwood 659, Chicago (2020); Faurschou Foundation, Beijing (2018); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017); Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2017); Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2016); ArtisTree, Hong Kong (2016); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015); Long Museum, Shanghai (2014); Lucerne Museum of Art, Lucerne (2011); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010); Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago (2009); Mudam Luxembourg (2008); Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo (2007); MoMA, New York (2004).

Liu has participated in numerous biennials, including the 58th and 51st Venice Biennale (2019, 2005); 11th, 8th and 5th Shanghai Biennale (2016, 2010, 2004); 3rd Aichi Triennial (2016); 13th and 9th Biennale de Lyon (2015, 2007); 11th Sharjah Biennale, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (2013); 4th, 3rd, 2nd and 1st Guangzhou Triennial (2012, 2008, 2005, 2002); and 6th Busan Biennale (2008).