![]() ![]() Love it, Bite it I, 2006–7, from Liu Wei’s series of world capitals built out of doggie chews. “We thought art should be free, it should be whatever you want it to be-it can be disconnected from politics and everything.” “They all had come up during a political period, and even though they were different from the Cultural Revolution artists, they still had a connection to politics and purpose.” Moving to Beijing after he graduated in 1996, Liu Wei gravitated toward a group of artists rebelling against such ideas. “My friends and I were looking at artists born in the 1960s, like Zhang Xiaogang and Wang Guangyi, and we didn’t agree with the way they did things,” he says. Studying technique was not important.” Although he achieved mediocre grades in college, he received high praise and encouragement from his teachers, who recognized his creative potential. “From that point on, I decided I wasn’t going to be a good student. “It had a great influence on me,” he says. A turning point for him, he recalls, was a lecture given by an American professor, titled “The Good Andy and the Bad Andy,” on Andy Warhol and Andrew Wyeth, respectively. “At that time in China, if you could do a great drawing you could become a famous artist,” says Liu Wei, who was more interested then in partying and arguing than studying. His family was already known by his teachers because his grandfather ran an important stationery company, with stores in China and Japan, that sold art supplies to such customers as Qi Baishi, China’s leading 20th-century modernist painter. The artist, who recalls a happy childhood spent drawing as his main form of play, attended the prestigious high school of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou when he was just 15. His paintings range in price from $100,000 to $400,000.īorn in 1972 in Beijing toward the end of the Cultural Revolution, Liu Wei spent his youth moving from place to place as his parents, both doctors, were assigned to various hospitals and clinics around the country. He had his first show in New York at Lehmann Maupin last February, and is also currently represented by Almine Rech Gallery in Paris, White Cube in London, and Long March Space in Beijing. The scope of his enterprise was made abundantly apparent at his 2011 retrospective at the Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai, which added to a resume that includes the Sharjah Biennial (2013), the Busan Biennial (2008), the Lyon Biennial (2007), Venice Biennale (2005), as well as the Shanghai Biennale (2004, 2010) and the Guangzhou Triennial (2002, 2005, 2008, 2012). “He is able to negotiate both the domestic art scene within China, but then is also able to hold his own in this larger international milieu.” Indeed, throughout his career, this artist has always been able to maintain an international presence, even while staying and working in Beijing. “Liu Wei is one of the leaders of his generation,” says Michelle Yun, curator of modern and contemporary art at New York’s Asia Society Museum. Liu Wei always believed “art should be free it can be disconnected from politics and everything.”ĬOURTESY THE ARTIST AND LEHMANN MAUPIN, NEW YORK AND HONG KONG ![]()
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