Magician Space is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Beijing based painter and video artist Liang Wei. The exhibition includes a selection of works from the past five years of her output, and is her first solo painting show to date.
Using oil, acrylic, and water based colors, Liang Wei has created a body of work that is varied in form, method, and content – but nonetheless retains a coherent and rigorous personal voice throughout. The wide variation of formal sensibilities between her works is a reflection of the extensive source of images that she uses as their starting points. Whereas Liang Wei’s previous work primarily used the accumulated detritus of contemporary society as their starting points, this has expanded in recent years to people, faces, landscapes, and old masters. These themes, however, are not explored for their meaning, but for their potential of transformation. Liang Wei tears images apart only to rearrange them into an utterly personal formal language. In the process one set of images dies, opening up the possibility for new images to emerge. Abstraction may be Liang Wei’s core language, but it is not necessarily what her work conveys. While some works seem to be reduced to pure abstractions, many other works betray an array of recognizable shapes and features. However, what appears as recognizable might have little relation to any source image used, and might instead be the eye attempting to make sense of the seemingly random shapes, making new and unintended images emerge from the chaos.
The balance between order and chaos is at the heart of Liang Wei’s practice. She tears up images only to reassemble them into abstract images that hover at the edge of chaos, challenging the viewer’s mind to restore order. The process is analogous to our daily struggle to make sense of the seemingly inexhaustible chaos of the world we live in. The struggle is fundamentally a psychological one – how our inner selves make sense of the nebulous obscurity outside.
