The first time I noticed Liu Wei was in the 1999 exhibition "Post-Sensibility". At that time his video work left me with a deep impression. I feel a simple and impulsive form in his works. This form is against any explanation as if it is composed of a different genetic code foreign to us. After this show, his photography works, oil paintings, and installation works one after another began to appear in various exhibitions. From these pieces, Liu Wei’s quick and impulsive working style comes to light. Though all from one artist, the differences between various works are quite large. His works are united by their challenging nature, their refusal of the viewer's comprehension and grasp, yet because all the works have an improvisational quality they continue to attract the viewer's gaze.
In 2005, when arranging the following year's exhibition program, I hoped that Liu Wei's exhibition would play the role of the year's “challenge” exhibition. The works in this exhibit can be divided into three parts. In the “cropped” series, Liu Wei first uses a Polaroid to take a photo of an object, then according to the photograph's composition he "crops" the real photographed object to match the photo. The original state of reality has been transformed and filtered through the photograph in order to construct a "new" reality. People's relationship to reality is redefined through this intermediate image. This intermediate stage is a flexible channel floating in the loophole between various individuals and reality. By emphasizing and focusing on this stage, and thereby producing a delusion of a "new" reality, reality itself becomes a continuum. Liu Wei's oil paintings achieve a similar wonderful result but from a different approach. The urban images in his oil paintings have undergone computer manipulation creating a novel combination of lines and colors. The city itself becomes the city structure and the embodiment of the atmosphere of interpersonal life.
The second part of the exhibition are two porcelain installations resembling spacecrafts. In this group of works, Liu Wei tries to complete a type of form which can to affect and touch people. He uses a child's perspective to refuse understanding and explanation.
The third group of works comprises the "Antimatter" series. In this series, the artist has taken objects with complex insides and opened them up and turned them inside out, transforming the inside into a new outer skin. He uses televisions, cameras, and other appliances and carries out on them a rather violent transformation. Through his treatment of these fixed forms he tries to reveal the capabilities, ambitions, and dangers of youth, and of course the unexplored capabilities of art.
As explained above, Liu Wei’s works in this solo exhibition are “crudely” grouped together; individual works from different series also refuse a dialogue among themselves. His works often appear with the stamp of "PROPERTY OF L.W."; this seal is perhaps Liu Wei's best explanation for his works. I use the artist's own words, "PROPERTY OF L.W." as the title of the exhibition as a representation of my own understanding thereby magnifying Liu Wei's individual talents. It is not my goal through this exhibition to create a certain fixed concept of ‘form’, but to allow the works to envelop us and speak for themselves.
Like the title of this exhibition，this exhibition is filled with a notion of desire, desire with respect to form. In the installation “As Long As I See It” and the urban landscape oil paintings one detects the characteristics of a Beijing sandstorm: crude, powerful, unpredictable, and violently destructive. Contemporary art, after it has undergone excessive narrations and explanations is in need of this type of sandstorm scrubbing.
