Liu Wei
All images courtesy of Universal Studios-Beijing
In the past few years, Chinese artists have increasingly made globalization the subject of their work. If irreverent images of Mao and bright gaudy peonies dominated the scene in the 1990s, the 2000s have been marked by images of the world outside China's borders. Photo-realistic paintings - often via Gerhard Richter - abound, including attacks on Pearl Harbor, chemical plant disasters in India and even foreign leaders. Jacques Chirac and Saddam Hussein as well as Rudolph Guiliani and George W. Bush are the princes and ninnies of Chinese art's latest visual parade.
Most of these images are made by boys and laced with the sloppy testosterone of an engorged national confidence. Others sniggle the anti-American sentiment echoed in most third-world fruit stalls and practically every self-respecting crepe joint in Paris. The images are at times threatening to outside observers, normally compassionate - but most always serious. As if to say, 'hey look, guys; we've got Viagara.'
Liu Wei falls into that class of casual global observers. But he doesn't come off as a kid with a bone to pick. What he's doing is fresh and not overly earnest. For the current show, he has constructed a series of ox-hide sculptures modeled on the world's landmark buildings. Ox-hide is the same material used to make bones for dogs to play with and chew on; and Liu Wei reportedly wanted to unleash a dog or two among his sculptures and let them gnaw and gnarl and lick to their heart's canine content.
The artist likes to play, and his penchant for twisting everyday materials into absurd new meaning takes priority over his interest in global politics. In a recent solo show at Beijing Commune, Liu Wei took Polaroids of interiors and then cut up the real objects wherever they extended beyond the frame of the snapshots. Soccer balls, refrigerators, sofas and even billiards tables got sawed off accordingly to make a creatively skewed installation and wrecked living space.
Here at China Art and Archives Warehouse, knee-high, waist-high and shoulder-high models stretch before us - of the White House and the Pentagon, Big Ben and the Tate Modern, and even St Peters. Monuments that are supposed to represent the pinnacle of human achievement are reduced to shriveled-up toy buildings fit for a city of mutts. His choice of material can't be misconstrued as an act of belligerence, but it does work as an act of play that reminds the viewer of how puny people are in the scheme of things.
Occasionally, he applies the same wackiness to his own home turf. Beijing gets the prod in warped versions of Tiananmen and the Great Hall of the People. Satirical but fun - an ox-hide Fido-land with a healthy dose of mischievous wit - snickers at this solo effort degenerate into uncontrollable yawps. In Liu Wei's chubby little world, all towers lean a little and nothing, not even a skyscraper, is fully erect.
Stacey Duff
'Love it, Bite it!': Liu Wei solo exhibition
China Art Archives and Warehouse (CAAW)
Until April 20
China Art and Archives Warehouse
Opposite Nangao Police Station, Chaoyang district
Beijing
T: +8610 8456 5152
www.archivesandwarehouse.com
Open 1-6pm Wed-Sun or by appointment
This show is held in cooperation with Universal Studios-Beijing. Resumes and additional info on the artist can be found at www.universalstudios.org.cn. Contact Ros Holmes at rosholmes@universalstudios.org.cn for further details.
Stacey Duff has an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University (US) and has lived in Beijing since 2003, where he is a regular contributor to ArtZineChina. He is also a poet, having previously published in magazines like Conjunctions, Skanky Possum and Octopus, and forthcoming work will appear soon in the new San Francisco magazine, Canteen. Since 2005, he has reported extensively on Chinese contemporary art as the art editor for TimeOut Beijing.
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