Li Wei

Born in 1970 in Hubei (China)
Lives and works in Beijing (China)

Li Wei’s artistic practice is a dynamic amalgamation of performance art and photography. Using acrobatics, props, cranes and wires, the artist surprises the viewer with dramatic, often amusing performance installations that depict him in photographs in gravity-defying situations, giving the impression of flight. Li Wei’s work has been widely shown across the globe, including: the 55^th Venice Biennale; the Katonah Museum of Art, United States; the Beijing Times Art Museum, China; the Daegu Photo Biennale 2010 in South Korea; the Palazzo Reale Museum, Milan; the Olympic Museum, Switzerland; the Criterion Gallery, Australia; the Toulouse Art Museum, France; the Ox Warehouse, Macau; the Prague Biennial 2003; the Beijing Red Square; the Hong Kong Arts Center; and the Performance Art Festival, Beijing. His impressive résumé also includes many solo exhibitions, including: Parc de la Villette, Paris; 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong; Shanghai Tang, Hong Kong; Tribeca, Madrid; Michael Schultz Gallery, Beijing; Mogadishni CPH Gallery, Denmark; Yeh Rong Jia Culture & Art Foundation, Taiwan; EScape Cultural Ample Gallery; PYO Gallery, Seoul; Galeria Espacio Minimo, Madrid; and Marella Gallery, Italy.

One of the photographs selected for the Karachi Biennale 2017, Boxing, embodies Li Wei’s artistic practice, depicting the artist himself falling from a skyscraper in Beijing during an apparent bout with another figure. The timing of the photograph, along with its composition, are immaculate; the artist is seen at the point of the punch’s impact, an act of violence, falling backwards off an edificial precipice, the bottom of which neither the artist nor the audience can see, imbuing the photograph with a sense of fear and danger. Li Wei’s matching chequered costume blends in with the surrounding buildings, confirming the reality of this danger by implying that he is soon to become a part of the architecture. The fact that the artist’s work is not an illusion created by careful editing on a computer, but partially a performative piece, forcibly provoking the viewer’s instinctive reactions to such visceral visual stimulus, subverts the justified cynicism that pervades our perception of photographic media in contemporary society.