Liu Wei

This parody of grotesque consumption re-emerges with Liu’s Love It! Bite It! – a model plan of a city made entirely from dog chews. Comically editing down the world to only the ’tastiest’ bits, Liu’s utopian vision re-engineers the breadth of Western history - from the Coliseum to the Guggenheim - as a carnivorous spectacle. Constructed with painstaking detail, ornate columns, cornices, and magnificent domes tower with warped approximation giving the scene a post-apocalyptic aura, rendering cultural heritage and power as an abject skeletal (or rawhide as the case may be) remain.

Liu’s paintings approach ideas of urban development from a future-fiction standpoint; his Purple Air series are unnerving predictions depicting the globe as one planetary megalopolis. Verging on abstraction, Liu’s imagined skyscrapers tower with a density exceeding space, their linear forms lit up like circuit boards, transmitting a bar-code existence. Devoid of any hint of nature, even the sky is stylised as screensaver inanity, toxic backdrops of smoggy grey or purple hanging over all. The title is taken from the Toaist scripture, where the term "purple air" denotes the original life force in the creation of the universe.

Liu's paintings approach ideas of urban development from a future-fiction standpoint; his Purple Air series are unnerving predictions depicting the globe as one planetary megalopolis. Verging on abstraction, Liu's imagined skyscrapers tower with a density exceeding space, their linear forms lit up like circuit boards, transmitting a bar-code existence. Devoid of any hint of nature, even the sky is stylised as screensaver inanity, toxic backdrops of smoggy grey or purple hanging over all. The title is taken from the Toaist scripture, where the term "purple air" denotes the original life force in the creation of the universe.

Liu Wei’s practice is uniquely varied. Working in video, installation, drawing, sculpture, and painting, there is no stylistic tendency which ties his work together. Rather Liu perceives the artist’s function as a responsibility of unmitigated, uncensored expression, tied to neither ideology nor form. Throughout Liu’s work lies an engagement with peripheral identity in the context of wider culture; his works often describe a sentiment of excess, corruption, and aggression reflective of cultural anxiety.

Liu’s sculpture Indigestion II is a monumental poo. Spanning two meters, it’s a man-sized statement of rejection. Crafted with comic exaggeration, Liu’s turd is both repulsive and compelling; leaving no detail to the imagination, Liu offers ‘too much information’ in the details. On closer inspection, half digested kernels emerge as hundreds of toy soldiers, spilling forth in an unmistakable sentiment of protest.