Lui Wei Born 1989 in Beijing (250%)

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?

NARRATOR:

Born 1989 in Beijing (250%) is an oil painting on canvas created in 1997 by Liu Wei. It measures about 150 centimetres high and 298 centimetres wide, similar to the size of a classroom blackboard.

Starting from the top left-hand corner, four portraits, each depicting the upper body of a baby, form a row on the canvas. These four babies are naked and have strange facial expressions and appearances. Their skin looks pink as if scalded, contrasting drastically with the black background. They occupy a quarter of the work’s surface, while the rest of the space is covered with the phrase ‘born 1989 in beijing’, written in English using greyish-white paint on a dark grey background. Between and around these phrases are around fifty faint images that vary in size, from impressions of human figurines in different costumes to broken limbs and unidentified organisms that appear covered in sarcomas. The whole painting looks full and chaotic.

The four babies at the top left corner of the work portray the artist himself when he was an infant. All of them look alike with round faces, bald heads, small pairs of lifeless eyes looking towards the left, and distorted mouths that look open even though the lips are stitched together. The head and body of each baby are swollen and deformed. Red finger-like objects grow out of their ears. Ball-like sarcomas also grow on the shoulders and upper arms of the baby on the far right.

The phrase ‘born 1989 in beijing’ repeats itself hundreds of times in lower-case letters, covering the rest of the canvas. Painted in different hues of greyish-white, the phrases overlap, and some are clear and readable while some are blurred. The writing looks so consistent, it looks like it might have been spray-painted with a stencil.

Juxtaposed with these words are images of human figurines, loose arms and legs, and sarcomas. Their heights range from as tall as one-third of the painting to the size of half of an adult’s palm. Most of these images are pink. They are painted over the words and in the background. The spaces between them are filled with handwritten numbers and symbols, including arrows and the numbers ‘250’ and ‘250%’.

The whole painting has black-and-white lines running vertically across it. They appear to be drip marks from when black and white paint was applied on the canvas.