Liu Wei

(Beijing, China, 1972)

Visual artist, he works in different media: video, installation, drawing, sculpture and painting. In his work he addresses the contradictions of our time, the changing urban landscape or the chaos of the world. His 1999 video installation Hard to Restrain portrays naked humans slithering like insects under a spotlight. It Looks Like a Landscape (2004) reinterprets traditional Chinese scroll painting, showing corporeality as a geographical accident. He has had solo exhibitions at the Samsung Museum of Art (Seoul, 2016), UCCA (Beijing, 2015), Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam, 2014) and Minsheng Art Museum (Shanghai, 2011). He also participated in the 13th Lyon Biennale in 2015, and in several group exhibitions on contemporary Chinese art, including What about the Art? Contemporary art from China at the Qatar Museum in Doha in 2016.

Underneath, 2001 is the video presented in banquet_metabolism and communication, where it reveals the hidden face of the urban dynamics of large cities. He juxtaposes images of Beijing's new suburbs - with their smart, sterile architecture, straight, orderly streets, and domesticated green spaces - with the mountains of garbage generated by an engulfed urban metabolism unable to recycle its avalanche of waste. . In the midst of a landscape of rotting garbage, a subhuman form of life emerges that seems to grow in proportion to the waste generated by so-called progress. The images offer a desolate social ecosystem in which a group of people pounce on the garbage thrown by huge garbage trucks, in search of food and recyclable materials.