Content area
Full Text
PAULINE J. YAO ON THE ART OF LIU WE
Whether slicing through refrigerators and washing machines, digging trenches in gallery floors, or erecting bristling, kaleidoscopic structures made from demolition debris, Beijing-based artist LIU WEI engages the realitje of our contemporary infrastructure with a sin_ intensity. For him, the corporeal surplus of burgeoning consumerism and near-frantic urbanization in China and in the world at !argentine junked appliances, the scraps of wood and metal- is a vehicle of rupture and disturbance a means by which to both figure, and counter the destabilizing forces of sociopolitical transformation. Here, curator and critic PAULINE J. YAO looks at a practice that unlocks the renewfsfl critici capacities of matter itself.
VISITORS TO BEIJING are invariably astonished by the profusion of vehicles clogging the city's roadways: bicycles, tricycles, mopeds, carts, and aluminumclad motorcycles in all shapes and sizes, each outfitted and equipped for a highly specific purpose. It is the sheer variety, not the volume, that is the most surprising thing of all. The stereotypical impression of contemporary China may be one of conformity, as emblematized by the Mao-era sea of bicycles or Olympic-ceremony performers in lockstep, but beneath the surface lies tremendous diversity - one just has to be trained to look for it. Liu Wei's practice could be conceptualized as a heuristic enterprise dedicated to precisely this kind of training, one made all the more necessary by the fact that heterogeneous forms of inequality regularly go unnoticed in China. It's hard to fathom the gulf that lies between the spaces where the artist's sculptures, paintings, and massively scaled semiabstract installations are produced - a studio compound in the semirural reaches of Beijing - and the well-heeled museums, galleries, and centers of the global art world the works have been known to occupy. Yet Liu's attention to this gap is brought into focus every day as he commutes from his upscale residential neighborhood to the entropie settlement of Shijiacun nestled outside the fifth ring road.
Shijiacun, or "Stone Village," is technically part of Beijing, though you wouldn't recognize it as metropolitan from the single-level dwellings lining dusty streets. Nor is Shijiacun occupied by Beijingers in the strict sense; rather, it is populated by migrants who have ventured here from the countryside...