From around the year 2000 onwards, the main subject matter of Liu Wei’s work shifted from the depiction of people to the depictions of fruit, flowers, landscapes, and various other “things”. He is extremely self-conscious of his work, refusing to become bogged down in the duplication of similar works. He mentions that he absolutely cannot bear repetition, commenting that “once I am done with something, I never want to do anything like it ever again.”

Liu Wei’s Scenery series, begun in 2003, inherits his usual stylistic complexity and attention to detail. Liu Wei pays particular attention to the structure of layers and the expression of texture in his work, with the use of thin and thick layers lending his brushwork a sense of speed tending towards the instinctual. In his Scenery No.4 the artist thus manifests a work that serves to disengage the concrete, transforming and developing a landscape of the abstract. The tousled grass, branches and leaves are set off against the brushwork to draw the viewer’s gaze into a vanished distance. Dissimilar from his signature “festering sensuality” characteristic of some of his earlier works, the accumulation and layering of colours here seems almost to appear as if by accident from the imposingly dense ashen fog, creating a scene seemly taken from an otherworldly dreamscape. The unrestrained tangle of black near the centre of the image almost gives the appearance of burn marks, adding a sense of chaos into the work. Through the organic union of the “empty” in the top half of the painting and the “chaotic” in the lower, the audience are granted a space of piercing imagination.

The seemingly disorderly brushwork and traces of colours being left to run indicate a transition from the “cynicism” and “mischief” present in Liu Wei’s early work into something more hidden, representative of a continuation in the artist’s own emotions of veiled ambiguity, whilst still retaining his ever-present stylistic complexity and delicate finessed artistic language, along with a rich usage of layering and texturing. The alternating layers of white against grey in the background seem to create an almost heightened sense of rhythm, with the sudden blank white space seeming almost to create a dialogue with traditional Chinese painting. In this work by Liu Wei, landscape changes into a kind of scenery diverging from specific directionality to become an accurate portrayal of our current era.

(Edited by Lijie Wang & Miao Zijin)