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Lot Essay
Liu Wei was a representative of Cynical Realism. His favourite images - portraits, dogs, children, landscapes, and businessmen - speak to a bucolic, bourgeois lifestyle, one that is ironically undermined by the artist's technique. The artist renders these subjects in a festering and intentionally grotesque manner. For him, the surface of existence is undermined by gluttonous and erotic urges. Liu often scribbles plaintive expressions in English across the surface of his paintings that are almost Freudian in their simple desires: "I like you", "you like pork", or "you like smoking". In this manner, Liu effectively embraces his own loss of idealism by bringing to the surface the repressed realities that lie immediately beneath the skin of bodily experience.
In Landscape (Lot 518) a misty landscape of trees and open road is covered in the artist idiosyncratic dripping white lines. The artist, when applying these lines, dilutes the pigments into a thin paste so that they flow freely over the canvas, loading the otherwise barren landscape with a dynamic energy. This kind of brushwork, which resembles the splatter-drips of Jackson Pollock and the sentimental lines of Cy Twombly, is remarkably expressionistic. At this stage, the works of Liu are generally a descendent of this particular breed of expressionism, fully in dialogue with artists in the same lineage. These lines also bear the flavour of Chinese art, calling to our mind the motion of the ink brush and the pulsating placidity and thrill of the artist. It becomes the unique brushing style of Liu. For him lines are more than a tool to shape and define; they possess emotion, and they express a spiritual realm. Indeed the translucent white that shrouds the canvas, creates an atmosphere of poetic transcendence.
In Landscape (Lot 517), the pink flesh spills out onto the canvas frame against a beautifully lit skyline. The composition is carefully balanced by Liu's delicate sense of colour and the precision of his technique. The painting is built up through a combination of washes and the subtle impasto of Liu's expressionistic brushwork. No human figure is present in this landscape, only the colours and textures imply its context, suggesting a move towards abstraction. His piquant, Fauvist style and Expressionist technique render the landscape into a mammoth 'mass of meat'. The work embodies the naked urges of human nature with the literati style landscape art, combining nature with physicality. Liu has once stated that "painting helps to relieve my own sense of helplessness and awkwardness". This image then is an abstracted "nature" - not a specific place but a vision into Liu's own worldview. For Liu, the exquisiteness of "beauty" cannot exist without the crude and grotesque, and it is in his on-going investigation into these oppositional urges that Liu explores and reveals the crass, poignant and hilarious nature of existence itself.
In Landscape (Lot 518) a misty landscape of trees and open road is covered in the artist idiosyncratic dripping white lines. The artist, when applying these lines, dilutes the pigments into a thin paste so that they flow freely over the canvas, loading the otherwise barren landscape with a dynamic energy. This kind of brushwork, which resembles the splatter-drips of Jackson Pollock and the sentimental lines of Cy Twombly, is remarkably expressionistic. At this stage, the works of Liu are generally a descendent of this particular breed of expressionism, fully in dialogue with artists in the same lineage. These lines also bear the flavour of Chinese art, calling to our mind the motion of the ink brush and the pulsating placidity and thrill of the artist. It becomes the unique brushing style of Liu. For him lines are more than a tool to shape and define; they possess emotion, and they express a spiritual realm. Indeed the translucent white that shrouds the canvas, creates an atmosphere of poetic transcendence.
In Landscape (Lot 517), the pink flesh spills out onto the canvas frame against a beautifully lit skyline. The composition is carefully balanced by Liu's delicate sense of colour and the precision of his technique. The painting is built up through a combination of washes and the subtle impasto of Liu's expressionistic brushwork. No human figure is present in this landscape, only the colours and textures imply its context, suggesting a move towards abstraction. His piquant, Fauvist style and Expressionist technique render the landscape into a mammoth 'mass of meat'. The work embodies the naked urges of human nature with the literati style landscape art, combining nature with physicality. Liu has once stated that "painting helps to relieve my own sense of helplessness and awkwardness". This image then is an abstracted "nature" - not a specific place but a vision into Liu's own worldview. For Liu, the exquisiteness of "beauty" cannot exist without the crude and grotesque, and it is in his on-going investigation into these oppositional urges that Liu explores and reveals the crass, poignant and hilarious nature of existence itself.