Biography

Liu Wei works with a range of media and styles to trace recurrent themes in his practice to personal experience, memory and the realities of a rapidly changing China.

Included in the 9th Sharjah Biennial was Hopeless Lands (2008), a highly sensitive and harrowing video of displaced farmers scavenging through the fields of waste that have become an important addition to their dwindling incomes.  This video reveals a largely unseen consequence of China's rapid economic development and urbanisation.

Wei’s work has been exhibited widely and was included in many of the first touring exhibitions of new Chinese art in the 1990s. Group presentations include those at the Gwangju Biennale (2010), the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, Chile (2010), the Sharjah Biennial (2009), the Musée Fabre, Montpelier, France (2008) and the Galerie Forde-Espace d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland (2008). He received the 2009 Moscow Festival Prize for Hopeless Land and participated in Transmediale, Berlin (2009). His work is found in public collections including the Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, Centre Pompidou, Paris and Casoria International Contemporary Art Museum, Casoria, Italy.

Liu Wei was born in 1965 and lives and works in Beijing. He graduated from the China National Academy of Fine Arts in 1992.

October 2010