COWBOYZOOM

Liu Wei: 散场/OVER

Long Museum (West Bund), Shanghai, China
November 11, 2020—January 17, 2021

Sàn chǎng: (of a theatre, cinema, etc.) empty after the show.
–The New Chinese-English Dictionary

Liu Wei (b.1972), represented by Long March Space, presents a large-scale solo exhibition OVER at Long Museum. The exhibition is one of China’s most anticipated of the year, showcasing recent installations, sculptures, and paintings from the established artist Liu Wei.

OVER represents Liu’s personal reflections on the unique moment in human history that is the year 2020. The artist transforms the Long Museum into a distant theater elevated above time and space, wherein the concepts, systems, and other causal relations of the world at this moment are thrown into a temporal vortex, resulting in Liu’s utterly original sculptures; a connecting theater of matters, figures, images, movement, and “void;” two or three dimensional “landscapes” of materials, colors, and lines; and a microcosm of the world’s current order called “microworld.”

The 2,800 square meters of exhibition space opens with a prelude, Dark Matter (2008/2020)—a site-specific installation representing hidden and invisible existence, in which one side leads to the earth and the other to the cosmos. Structurally, the entire exhibition pivots on its largest spatial installation, 1,098.1 Tons Desert (2020), wherein sand and desert serve as material and landscape indicators, drawing the viewer’s attention to the core regions of the world’s political, economic, and cultural conflicts—the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia, thus shedding light on land, capitalism, colonization, trade, and even climate issues. These become the key elements of OVER (2020), the central work of the exhibition.

OVER is a large-scale installation that combines elements of sculpture, video, and painting. Through a serious yet playful performative scenarios, it showcases two types of consciousness and power—the progressive ideal of futurism, communism, and suprematism, and the capitalist world order shaped by colonialism and imperialism—and how the constant collision of these polar ideas have constructed today’s world. To put it another way, OVER displays how the past world directed the unending drama of today’s world through ideas, images, symbols, object relations and regulation of the human body. Centering around OVER are a new series of sculptures named Because They Can (2020), two Microworlds of different dimensions, Dark Matter at the beginning, as if a selected series of specimens obtained via different means and through which we inspect the development of our world. The video work, Fruits for Breakfast (2017), depicts the changes that time and space impose upon physical matters. Painting also plays an important role in the exhibition’s narrative: a five-meter-wide abstract painting illustrates the beauty of our time while revealing its source: produced and defined by current image production technology. Correspondingly, in another new series of paintings, Liu calls forth his own body as a subject of perception and action, recording the individual’s contemplation of nature.

Looking at Liu Wei’s creative trajectory, the new works in OVER represent his new developments in the various media languages and methods. They also reflect the artist’s consistent contemplation of the body, matter, ideology, and global order—they are his commentary and manifesto on the world after a long period of observation and practice. Ultimately, the exhibition points to a path of transcendence: transcending the material world, time, space, the body, senses, and self-consciousness. Indeed, these works, together with the entire exhibition, are bidding farewell to the defunct and collapsing world of the past. Yet the end heralds a new beginning. Thus: OVER.

Farewell, era of matter and the body. The complex and broken civilization will send humankind as a whole into the ranks of the gods.

Dark Matter
wood, iron, steel, black paint, 1022.2×1109.9×1010.6cm, 650cm each side, 2008/2020. Image courtesy of Liu Wei Studio

1098.1 Tons Desert
sand, glass, steel, 1100×1100×560cm, 2020. Image courtesy of Liu Wei Studio

Long Museum