Monumental and majestic, Liu Wei’s towering Landscape is a masterwork of instant visual and sensuous impact. Painted in 2008, a full decade after Liu Wei turned to landscapes, the reverberating landscape is exemplary of Liu Wei’s most accomplished and mature works that epitomize his utterly unique artistic outlook and purist creative philosophy. Whereas his brushwork remains meticulously and deftly complex in terms of texture, speed and rhythm, the overall tableau is open and expansive, demonstrating a holistic and peaceful communion with nature in contrast with the caustic cynicism or ruminating melancholy of earlier works. As Jason Wang observes: “Prior to 2004, Liu’s work was often suffused with an ominous griminess and gloominess or a ruthless venting of frustration and anger projecting the anxiety and despair of human existence […] Post-2004, perhaps gradually experiencing for himself the essence of t.mes and its natural power, Liu’s works seem to be showing a nascent learning of how to coexist with nature […] Since then, his tableaus have eased back […] Contrasted against the compulsive technique of earlier works that had him in a hurry to express the festering and rotting of the flesh, Liu remains interested in the process of how to re-create the ‘living Hell’ of the animated creatures of nature. What’s really different now is he’s willing to let nature move along to its own rhythm, turning the painting into a proxy for the viewer seeing, feeling and sensing ‘t.mes ’” (Chia Chi Jason Wang, in Liu Wei: A Solo Painter, Taipei 2012, p. 20-21).

Born in Beijing in 1965, Liu Wei studied printmaking at the Beijing Central Academy of Replica Handbags s and graduated in the watershed year of 1989. In the early 1990s, Liu Wei swiftly became known as a prominent figure of the Cynical Realism movement by way of his acclaimed Revolutionary Family series. These early works demonstrated a virtuosic blending of a wide array of influences – from Chinese calligraphy to Expressionism – that resulted in a unique stylized technique which critic Li Xianting called “expressionistic deformation” (Li Xianting cited in Chia Chi Jason Wang, in Liu Wei: A Solo Painter, Taipei 2012, p. 13). Vividly festering, Liu Wei’s deformed, grotesque, and ‘ugly’ images were interpreted by critics to espouse biting social commentary; as critic Lu Peng observed, “the rot in reality [Liu Wei] observed in reality was depicted as rot”, and that “ugliness became the first step in the liberation of his artistic images” (Ibid, p. 944). The success of Liu Wei’s “expressionistic deformation” is test.mes nt to his exceedingly accomplished painterly dexterity. Subsequent to the Revolutionary Family series, which received global recognition at the Venice Biennale in the early 1990s, Liu Wei's ensuing You Like Pork? and Swimming series in the mid to late 1990s reveal progressive maturation in the artist's technique, which finally achieved full virtuosity in his landscapes and still lifes of the 2000s.

Towards the late 2000s, Liu Wei’s iconic festering aesthetic settled further into a new rhythm – the natural rhythms of nature and its natural cycles. In Wang’s words: “In Liu’s art, whether it’s a broad landscape casting nature as counterpart to the eternal, the brief flowering of a blossom or the faint fermentation of a rotting carrot and potato, these all account for a considerable slice of his creative t.mes […] Liu Wei visualized the decay and rotting of natural things with the passage of t.mes , leading people to witness the true, unchanging state of life in the natural cycle” (Chia Chi Jason Wang, in Liu Wei: A Solo Painter, Taipei 2012, p. 20-21). Landscape serves as a superlative example through which to examine the development in Liu Wei's personal vision as well as his mastery over brush and pigment. The details of the lush pastoral landscape exhibits the full range of Liu Wei’s accomplishments in technique and brushwork: visually compelling in terms of sumptuously rendered texture and its ability to present colour as its own entity, Landscape is a joy to behold as it revels in the possibilities of pigment and brush. Unlike many other important artists of his generation, Liu Wei is the most reticent, reluctant to attribute any meaning or purpose to his images; the artist simply paints what his mind and brush impels him to paint. The present Landscape displays to perfection not only Liu Wei’s extraordinarily deft grasp of technique and his acute mastery of medium; it also encapsulates his prerogative to create art for art’s sake and his reveling in the simple delights and challenges of representation, texture, colour, and form.