WU MO:
Hello, I’m Wu Mo, a curator from M+. I’m going to share how the visual references in this painting relate to the real world at that time when Liu Wei created the work.
We can see four bright pink unidentified creatures that look like human babies in the upper left corner. The vibe is eerie and intense, as if something is about to explode.
A large portion of this painting is covered with the English phrase ‘born 1989 in Beijing’ in dense, grey-white scribbles. It is as if we can recite it again and again to constantly remind ourselves. Between these phrases are images of infant toys, dismembered limbs, and unidentified objects. These images echo the bright pink human babies, who look like decaying flesh. Amid these images are the numbers ‘250’ and ‘250%’, referring to the Chinese slang ‘erbaiwu’, which means ‘idiot’.
Liu Wei graduated from the Printmaking Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1989, the same year when the Tiananmen Square Incident occurred. When lofty idealism and the aspirations of artists plunged into chaos in a rapidly changing political environment, Liu Wei chose to use his paintings to reflect the world he was living in.
Over time, different people have different interpretations of the symbols in this painting. What do you think they mean?
