Li Wei

Though Li Weiʼs works are still in the field of two dimensional painting, her creations are clearly marked by experimental qualities. From the Zhejiang Art Academy Middle School to the Nanjing Art Institute and on to the Central Academy of Fine Arts, from middle school to BFA to MFA, Li Wei experienced three very different academic styles, and this has imbued her art with no small amount of openness and acceptance.

As a graduate student, Li Wei seemed infatuated with lines, and set out in a conscious pursuit of their pure expressive power. On the one hand, she used the traditional Chinese proscriptions about lines and proportions, giving her work the feel of traditional Chinese outlines; on the other hand, she searched for a new kind of visual effect with her combination of Western charcoal lines and handmade paper. Li focuses a lot of attention on “nature”, but for her generation, born in the 1970ʼs, “nature” is just another word for surrounding environs. She places more emphasiscontradictions between industry, mechanization, handcrafting and nature.

While pursuing originality and breakthroughs in her personal artistic language, Li also hopes to reach strong visual effects in her work. In
some early small works, she used extremely bright colours and arranged them according to scientific principles to create a dazzling image. The
bustling shops, the glowing night-time street scenes and quiet residential compounds correlate to our experiences of everyday life, but once
theyʼve been deconstructed into a dot matrix, they become strange and unfamiliar. Li Weiʼs Dot Matrix series actually created a different viewing
method – creating different visual perceptions from different distances. If you stand a certain distance from the picture, the dots of various
gradients come together to form a realistic image, but when you move closer, what you see are distinct dots arranged with exacting order. There is
also a sense of instability, giving rise to diversity within the picture.

Though this process requires much patience and hard labour from the artist, she sees it as not just a creative necessity but also a measured
record of her life. For Li Wei, artistic creation is a daily necessity for her life, and the result of that creation is just an added surprise.
Li Wei held her first solo exhibition at Beijingʼs Today Art Museum in 2009, mostly exhibiting works from the past three years. In her creative
process, Li Wei has further separated the subject of her depictions and the act of depicting them into two phases: the first entails considering what
to depict and planning each step; the second entails the experience of the process and the verification of the plan, as well as serendipitous
discoveries and a deeper understanding of the materials. Some of the works incorporate Western perspective while using traditional Chinese ink
techniques while further incorporating handcrafted effects, intentionally preserving the bleeding of water, ink and brush, and flowing with
serendipity and possibility. (Zhao Li)