Li Wei (artist)
| Li Wei | |
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| Born |
5 September 1970 Hubei, China |
| Nationality | Chinese |
| Education | Suzhou Silk College Central Academy of Fine Arts Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts An Hui Teachers' College Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts |
| Li Wei | |||||||
| Chinese | 李 日韦 | ||||||
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| Transcriptions | |
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Li Wei (born in 1970, Hubei, China) is a contemporary artist from Beijing, China. His work often depicts him in apparently gravity-defying situations. Wei started off his performance series, Mirroring, and later on took off attention with his Falls series which shows the artist with his head and chest embedded into the ground. His work is a mixture of performance art and photography that creates illusions of a sometimes dangerous reality. Li Wei states that these images are not computer montages, but that he uses mirrors, metal wires, scaffolding and acrobatics.
Wei's works have been published on the cover of the following magazines: Flash Art, Work, Magazin-Frankfurter Rundschau, Out of the Red, Zoom, Juliet, Contemporary, Theater Forum, NY Arts, Fine Arts Literature, Lapiz and Arte Al Limite.
Li Wei grew up being a son of a farmer and had wanted to become an artist for a career. With family support he had the special privilege to study at a private arts school until he was tired of the school's traditional approach of teaching. However, Li Wei's struggle with art did not end early in his life. After Li Wei became independent he had to work numerous jobs (delivering food and house keeper) in Beijing in order for him to sustain himself; but more importantly he needed the money to supply his art works (at the time painting) so that he could continue to work towards his dream. After Li Wei kick started his career as an artist by working with paint, Li Wei realized a newfound passion and wanted to specialize in a different form of art. In 1999 he believed that "only performance art offers a chance to experience an action's message through one's own body". Since then Li Wei has been intentional about his art pieces and has desired to express his work publicly with a message behind each art piece. Li Wei has been expressing his art by capturing photos of his own body and images of himself to relay a message towards his audience.
But before becoming a photographer Li Wei started as a performance artist simply because he wanted to document his performances. In an interview with AOL News Li Wei states "When I started doing this, it was 2000, I only used photography to record the procedure of my performance art. Then, after the 'Li Wei falls into ... ' series, I found this way of shooting as my signal." And since then Li Wei has already a performed for over 150 shots and many of these shots have risked his life. Li Wei himself admits that he shoots in extremely dangerous situations and he thinks the creation of his artwork isn't as a big of a challenge than being in the dangerous situation for his performance shootouts. Some of these dangerous scenarios include shots on high buildings, lakes, ice holes and even through the windshield of a war.
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Wikipedia