Li Wei

Li Wei is an internationally known Chinese artist born in 1970. In his work, Wei combines several artistic mediums including performance, photography, installation and video that create illusions of a sometimes dangerous reality. Often depicted in apparently gravity-defying situations including floating in the air, on the top of a skyscraper, or falling upside down from the sky, with his head embedded into the ground, the Chinese artist doesn’t use computer montages, but mobilizes cranes, scaffoldings and metal wires to achieve his acrobatic images.

At age 19, Li Wei migrated to Beijing. In 1993 he enrolled in a private art school to study oil painting but left it after a year due to his disappointment with its dogmatic teaching methods. Through his association with performance artist Zhu Ming, who were a close friend to the East Village artists group, led by Zhang Huan, Li Wei was introduced to performance art, which, for him, appeared both novel and inspiring. Wei came to realize that performance art was a more effective way through which to execute his artistic concept, and that the human body was a more effective medium through which to carry out his artistic ideas. In the East Village art community, the shocking performance works by Zhang Huan and Ma Liuming opened his eye. Li came to understand the repetitive rhetoric of painting and decided to give up painting to engage with performance art. It enabled Wei to have a dialogue with his audience and to bring them into the artistic process. In addition, performance art also allowed Li Wei to create and manipulate his own fantasy realities.

He began to use mirrors in a distinctive way to scrutinize and play with reality. The mirror would usually contain a hole in the middle for Li Wei to insert his head. With this technique he is able to create an “illusory superimpositions and fusions” and to express his personal thoughts, experiences and address some social issues that occur in our daily lives.

Li Wei’s rise to fame was through his performance of the “Falls” series in which he sticks himself in the group as a missile. His work questions human perceptions of social spaces and expresses a need of freedom: it draws out the fine line between reality and fantasy and points it out to the audience. His art may seem humorous but they address wide range of topics from gender relations to politics.

Li Wei has participated in numerous solo and group exhibited worldwide, including China, France, US, Denmark, Hong Kong, UK, Italy, Spain and Australia, among others. HIs works have been published on the cover of the magazines such as Flash Art, Work, Magazin-Frankfurter Rundschau, Out of the Red, Zoom, Juliet, Contemporary, Theater Forum, NY Arts, Fine Arts Literature, Lapiz and Arte Al Limite.

Artist lives and works in Beijing, China.