Liu Wei
19 Sep - 25 Oct 2009
LIU WEI
"Yes, That’s All!"
September 19 through October 25, 2009
Boers-Li Gallery is proud to announce the opening of the new exhibition by Chinese artist Liu Wei on September 19th 2009. The exhibition, titled "Yes, That's All !" is the artist's second solo show at the gallery.
This entirely new exhibition brings together work which grows out of Liu Wei's conceptual musings over the last two years on the image-saturated nature of contemporary society and the visual re-creation this engenders. As in the past, Liu Wei's vigorous art is used to show the outcomes of these considerations. It ranges in medium from video installation to sculpture, painting, and other directions. "Disturbance" is perhaps the overarching concept of this exhibition; the artist will show a series of paintings based on images produced by television signals undergoing disturbance, characterized by irregular lines and abstract language. These "disturbed" images proliferate like mold, encompassing every possible location, including a highly designed television sound stage, natural scenery, and all sorts of postcard vistas. A disturbed television program becomes a font of ice-cold images, devoid of any preferentiality. The images, in turn, display a wizened beauty.
For the artist, "disturbance" is not merely a way of closing himself off from the politics of everyday life, into a world of symbolist reference, but rather an analysis of the abstract epistemological status of contemporary humankind. Regardless of our divergent positions, directions, gender identities, or other differences, Difference has already assumed the status of an electronic chip, preprogrammed into our consciousness. In this sense, the whole world is always already "disturbed." Disturbance is a reality, and the artist's interest in this exhibition is to isolate examples of "disturbance" from real scenes, not to eliminate it for the purpose of clearer analysis. The artist here uses a poetic method that makes us conscious of the ways in which disturbance and images coexist. Thus, we see how a once-perfect world becomes distorted like this exhibition space, crumbling while yet maintaining a kind of alternative beauty.
"Yes, That's All !" might be seen as a continuation of series including "Anti-Matter" (2006) and "The Outcasts" (2007), which have been assigned a particularly "punk" character by the critics. And yet where these works persistently use a "punk" sensibility to re-imagine and modify electronic products and other fabricated images, the current exhibition employs a contagious scene and a particular electronic aesthetic to push the viewer to see the good life in a new light. In this way, it confuses any dichotomies the viewer might wish to draw between simple and complex, rich and poor, or freedom and coercion.
Liu Wei was born in 1972 in Beijing, where he continues to live and work. In 2008, he was awarded the Chinese Contemporary Art Award. Other upcoming exhibitions include shows at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, (October 2009) and Centre George Pompidou, Paris, (summer 2010).
Liu Wei's exhibition, "Yes, That's All !" will run from September 19 through October 25, 2009
"Yes, That’s All!"
September 19 through October 25, 2009
Boers-Li Gallery is proud to announce the opening of the new exhibition by Chinese artist Liu Wei on September 19th 2009. The exhibition, titled "Yes, That's All !" is the artist's second solo show at the gallery.
This entirely new exhibition brings together work which grows out of Liu Wei's conceptual musings over the last two years on the image-saturated nature of contemporary society and the visual re-creation this engenders. As in the past, Liu Wei's vigorous art is used to show the outcomes of these considerations. It ranges in medium from video installation to sculpture, painting, and other directions. "Disturbance" is perhaps the overarching concept of this exhibition; the artist will show a series of paintings based on images produced by television signals undergoing disturbance, characterized by irregular lines and abstract language. These "disturbed" images proliferate like mold, encompassing every possible location, including a highly designed television sound stage, natural scenery, and all sorts of postcard vistas. A disturbed television program becomes a font of ice-cold images, devoid of any preferentiality. The images, in turn, display a wizened beauty.
For the artist, "disturbance" is not merely a way of closing himself off from the politics of everyday life, into a world of symbolist reference, but rather an analysis of the abstract epistemological status of contemporary humankind. Regardless of our divergent positions, directions, gender identities, or other differences, Difference has already assumed the status of an electronic chip, preprogrammed into our consciousness. In this sense, the whole world is always already "disturbed." Disturbance is a reality, and the artist's interest in this exhibition is to isolate examples of "disturbance" from real scenes, not to eliminate it for the purpose of clearer analysis. The artist here uses a poetic method that makes us conscious of the ways in which disturbance and images coexist. Thus, we see how a once-perfect world becomes distorted like this exhibition space, crumbling while yet maintaining a kind of alternative beauty.
"Yes, That's All !" might be seen as a continuation of series including "Anti-Matter" (2006) and "The Outcasts" (2007), which have been assigned a particularly "punk" character by the critics. And yet where these works persistently use a "punk" sensibility to re-imagine and modify electronic products and other fabricated images, the current exhibition employs a contagious scene and a particular electronic aesthetic to push the viewer to see the good life in a new light. In this way, it confuses any dichotomies the viewer might wish to draw between simple and complex, rich and poor, or freedom and coercion.
Liu Wei was born in 1972 in Beijing, where he continues to live and work. In 2008, he was awarded the Chinese Contemporary Art Award. Other upcoming exhibitions include shows at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, (October 2009) and Centre George Pompidou, Paris, (summer 2010).
Liu Wei's exhibition, "Yes, That's All !" will run from September 19 through October 25, 2009