Liu Wei’s Night Gone Wild at White Cube, West Bund Shanghai

Liu Wei’s Night Gone Wild hangs at White Cube’s booth at West Bund Art & Design until 15 November, part of the Purple Air series that has occupied the artist for two decades. The painting uses digital deconstruction as its engine: Liu manipulates photographic source material through software until the original subject dissolves, then builds the abstracted digital composition into large scale work in oil and acrylic, colour and form emerging where recognisable content once was.

The composition moves through pale cream, sage green, burgundy and putty grey stripes, each interrupted by lavender, teal, burnt sienna, black and ochre that seem to float and shift across the surface. Vertical rhythm structures the work almost architecturally, while colour washes and splashes introduce an element of chance within his deliberate system. The effect creates studied chaos: what obscures and what reveals happen at once, with no moment of pure clarity.

What distinguishes Liu’s approach is the refusal of decoration. The title itself signals intent: Night Gone Wild suggests excess, sensation at the edge of visibility, what remains unconstrained by the systematic digital processes that govern the underlying logic. The hand of the artist remains visible in the precision of edge and subtlety of tone, even as software determines the composition’s skeleton.

Liu Wei was born in 1972 in Hangzhou and studied at the China Academy of Art. White Cube represents him across their London, Hong Kong and Shanghai spaces. The Purple Air series, begun in 2006, has defined his artistic trajectory: a sustained investigation into the intersection of digital technology and traditional painting practice, each work refining his conversation with software and pigment.

For Liu, these paintings express what language cannot: the presentation of reality’s hidden dimensions. In an age of total visual documentation, his work argues for what remains opaque, for the value of obscurity and for paint itself as a tool capable of capturing what cameras cannot. The painting invites looking at close range and from distance, each vantage point revealing different relationships between colour, form, pattern and concealment.

White Cube shows Night Gone Wild at Booth 1C05, West Bund Art Center, Shanghai, until Sunday, 15 November.

Liu Wei was born in 1972 in Hangzhou and studied at the China Academy of Art before establishing himself as a leading figure in contemporary Chinese painting. His work has been shown internationally across major galleries and museums, with White Cube representing him across their London, Hong Kong and Shanghai spaces. The Purple Air series, begun in 2006, marks his sustained investigation into the intersection of digital technology and traditional painting practice, a dialogue that has defined his artistic trajectory across two decades and shaped his approach to colour, form and the photograph’s dissolution into abstraction.

Night Gone Wild is displayed at West Bund Art & Design, Shanghai’s principal contemporary art fair held annually at the West Bund Art Center. The fair runs until 15 November 2024, with White Cube occupying Booth 1C05. West Bund draws galleries, collectors and institutions from across Asia and beyond, making it a significant venue for artists working at the scale and conceptual intensity Liu Wei pursues. The fair’s waterfront location in Shanghai’s Huangpu District has established it as a key platform for contemporary practice in the region.

Liu’s method combines analogue painting with digital tools in a process he has refined across the Purple Air series: he deconstructs photographic source material through software manipulation until the original subject becomes unrecognisable, then uses those abstracted digital compositions as the basis for large scale paintings executed in oil and acrylic. This hybrid approach means each work carries the precision of digital geometry alongside the material unpredictability of paint, allowing him to explore states of visibility and concealment that neither medium alone could achieve. The result is a visual language that resists easy categorisation, situated between representation and abstraction, between chance and control.

Imagery courtesy of White Cube (@whitecube).