LI WEI has been seen hanging upside down with his head under water from Italy to Hong Kong, falling off buildings in Beijing and New York and even crashing head first through car windows to communicate his artistic message through daring performances.
In this exhibition, BEYOND GRAVITY, Li Wei continues to awe with unexpected freshness exploring current day issues that effect him and society in general. “Beyond Gravity” deals with desire. The desire of wanting material goods, the desire for love’s lost innocence, the desire for power. Li Wei communicates his messages profoundly without language. He is seen flying away with a BMW, a dozen collaborators pulling at his heals. He is the arrow with his female cupid shooting him out of a luxury car. He is also the reflection in his iconic mirror, where he sticks his head through a well cut hole, showing us both the past nostalgia of the Hou Hai lake buildings of Beijing and their modern day conversions into trendy bars and restaurants inside.
Li Wei is very particular about his performances and every detail of their staging is well thought out. He does not want to be perceived as a circus act and the depth of the meaning of his work is at the heart of each performance. Eleanora Battiston has said of his work, “His photos always immortalize him at the very limits of the absurd and are stupendous for their originality that, at times, borders on madness.” And indeed some of the physical acts that Li Wei endures are pure lunacy. He laughs pointing to scars on his arms and neck and tells stories of passing out while upside down with his head in a roughly cut glass floor suspended by a rope. There is very little retouching done to his work, besides erasing a cable or a rope that suspends him, and it is startling to know that he does do every act.
The levity of Li Wei’s performances is not absent of wit and humour. His Beyond Gravity series will include a performance at the Shanghai Tang shop in Hong Kong located in the 1881 Heritage Building of Tsim Sha Tsui. The highly ambitious project attempts to wrap the entire old fire house now converted into a luxury shop and Li Wei will fly into the sky, with everything in tow. The title of the work, “Take Away,” touches on our desire of wanting and in that wanting there are no limits. Shanghai Tang managing director, Raphael Le Masne says,
LI WEI (Hubei, 1970) lives and works in Beijing. Since 2000 he has regularly shown his work in China, the U.S. and Europe in private galleries, museums and institutional centers. Exhibitions include Open Art Platform at the Performance Art Festival, 2000, Constructed Reality - Beijing/Hong Kong Conceptual Photography at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, Scar - Chinese Conceptual Photography at the Exhibition Hall of Capital Normal University, 2001, and Flying – Performance, Photography, Videos, Beijing Red Square, 2002.
Abroad he has been included in shows such as Mois de la Photo, Histories de Chine in Auxerre, France, 2002, Out of the Red - China Art Now at the FlashArt Museum in Italy and the Prague Biennial, 2003, Between Past and Future - New Photography and Video from China in ICP, Asia Society, New York and Smart Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago, Officina Asia at Galleria d’Arte Moderna Cesena, Bologna Italy. Other recent exhibitions include Tiananmen, in Paris, and MMAC Japan, Artificial Merriment, Melbourne Australia, 2004, and Between Past and Future at the Seattle Art Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2005, Beijing 2008, Olympic Museum, Lausanne, Swiss 2008, Olhares Interiores – Inward Gazes, Documentaries of Performances Art – Museum of Macao, Macau 2008 and the China: the Contemporary rebirth, Palazzo Reale Museum, Milan, Italy 2009.
