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Liu Wei

Liu Wei was born in Beijing in 1972 and graduated from the China Academy of Art in 1996. His artistic practice is varied, as he works in video, installation, drawing, sculpture, and painting. Rather than having a stylistic tendency, Liu Wei perceives the artist's function as a being unmitigated, uncensored expression, tied to no particular ideologies or forms. 

Early Career

Liu Wei has stated that he "really began doing art after [he] graduated in 1996." Between 1996 and 1998, he experienced a post-graduate period of transition in which he was producing idealistic oil paintings. In 1998 and 1999, he also began producing installation works as well as video projects. The majority of these video projects were related to the human body.He described these works as impulsive and intuitive; works of a still young and impulsive artist.

Artistic Style and Process

In an interview from 2010, Liu Wei was asked, "How would you define your work?" to which he replied, "I couldn't. There's no way to define it."

Rather than beginning with a material or a technique, Liu Wei beings his artistic endeavors with ideas and then considers how best to express them. When he becomes comfortable and "fluent" with a particular type of work and no longer finds any obstacles or problems within that material type and the style it achieves, he changes his materials and styles.

Yet Liu Wei readily admits that there is no way to completely "kill" the idea of style. "Actually, there is always still something beneath," he has said, "But I could never use some surface things - for example, the way lots of artists use a representative form, almost like a symbol or emblem - as a way to define my work, or to prove that I had a style of position." Liu Wei suggested that, much like physics, "when a structure is at rest, it no longer has any energy, but when the structure is broken, and its parts begin to move around again, it is filled with energy, power, and vitality." It is through continually moving from one style and material to another that Liu Wei perceives his artwork as maintaining interest.