Liu Wei

Liu Wei (; born 1972 in Beijing) is a Chinese artist based in Beijing. He works in varied media – video, installation, drawing, sculpture, and painting – with no uniting stylistic tendency, though the Saatchi Gallery finds a uniting theme of "a sentiment of excess, corruption, and aggression reflective of cultural anxiety". Conceptualism, satire, and humor are the hallmarks of his works.

His works include the Super Structure series of model cityscapes constructed from dog chews; the Purple Air oil paintings of stylised skyscraper cityscapes; the Landscape Series of landscapes made from photographic composites of human buttocks; and Indigestion II, a two-metre model turd.

He has shown work in exhibitions including 21: World Wide Video Festival in Amsterdam, Cinema du Reel at the Pompidou Centre in France, Over One Billion Served at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, and Between Past and Future at the International Center for Photography in New York City. His dog chew structures were in 2010 once again shown during the exhibition Dreamlands at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. On October 21, 2025, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that Liu had been chosen for the 2026 Genesis Facade Commission; it will be on display September 17, 2026, through June 8, 2027.

Early career Liu graduated from China Academy of Art in Hangzhou in 1996. He 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.

"Post-Sense Sensibility" group Liu began his career as a member of the subversive movement known as Post-Sense Sensibility. Art trends that had been popular in the early 1990s, such as political pop and cynical realism, seemed outdated and ineffective to many of the younger generation artists. Later in the 1990s, new art forms such as installation, performance art, video art, and conceptual photography were widely embraced and were used to demonstrate conceptual art that came to dominate contemporary Chinese art. The 1999 show "Post-sense, Sensibility, Alien Bodies and Delusion" in Shaoyaoju, Beijing, was one that included artists from all over China, notorious for visceral sculptures of human and animal corpses, "borrowed" cadavers juxtaposed with stillborn fetus, severed human arms hanging from meat hooks, and the sounds of a goose, starving to death with its feet glued to the floor. The purpose of the exhibition was to create art that would not be collected by Western audiences, which reveals the extent of resentment against Western powers. The young generation of artists accused foreign collectors of "plotting to control Chinese art."

Yet Lui 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."

The photograph was entered and accepted in the Shanghai Biennale after organizers of the exhibition requested he make adjustments to his original submission idea, a train car on a rotating turntable. Rather than accommodate the wishes of the organizers, Wei submitted Looks Like a Landscape. In his description of the work Liu Wei has said "I was really angry, really angry, so I decided to show them an ass." Despite the subject matter, the organizers of the Shanghai Biennale were pleased with the traditional Chinese tone of the work and accepted it into the exhibition.

After the Biennale, Liu Wei became a known figure in the world of contemporary Chinese art. In an interview with Barbara Pollack, Wei attributes his initial career success to Looks Like a Landscape. In the interview Wei said "This photograph changed my life and made it possible for me to live off my work".