Merely a Mistake II No.1, Liu Wei, "The Section of Experimental Art at the 27th National Art Exhibition"

When drive passing by small towns and city suburbs, one can see large lands bought by the waste management companies to store doors and windows from the demolition sites. In the recent twenty years of rapid urbanization, construction waste have piled up into “fortress of debris,” a harsh reality we have to deal with. Inspired by this experience, this work is a re-making of this experience.

In this work, the artist has stacked up many abandoned doorframes to occupy the entire space of the studio. During the building up process, he has discovered a “new” visual order emanated from geometric shapes, horizontal and vertical lines of these wooden frames. This order has nothing to do with the materiality, function or social meanings of these doorframes, and it is purely visual, related to formal qualities and scales. It resembles what the artist has done in his previous series “Anti-Materiality,” in which he reverses the interior and exterior, visible and invisible parts of objects in order to break the viewer’s conventional thinking of the objects-and therefore, opens up new possibilities to experience and conceive the world. In this work, following this new order, the artist creates a contradictory form: it forms a clear structure with refine details, but has no practical function, and rejects deeper interpretations. Every detail and facet visualizes a pair of contradictory concepts: elegant and awkward, visible and invisible, symmetrical and asymmetrical, refine and coarse, logical and non-sense.

Through the remaking of ready-mades, the artist constructs an object as a refraction of the world, opening the gate to the other side of reality. However, if the viewer insists on ignoring the artist’s attempts, all what he has done is nothing more than merely a mistake.