HONG KONG, MARCH 2006 — Beijing performance and conceptual photographer Li Wei, may live and work in China but his fame and popularity is flying all over the world as he executes such dangerous performances, for arts sake, that he oftentimes sustains near fatal injuries. 10 Chancery Lane Gallery in SoHo will host his first Hong Kong exhibition of performance photographs as well as have a his first Hong Kong performance in Hong Kong Harbour where he will be suspended upside down in the Harbour itself.
Li Wei likes being upside down in precarious situations as well as on the verge of falling off skyscrapers or flying through the air. He is not afraid to have endurance tests on himself to make an artistic statement. His language of communication is performance. He is renowned for his series of performances in which his body acts a missile that seems to have fallen from the sky and his head having landed on earth, or through a car windshield or through a glass floor, etc. His other works show him leaning off the edge of a skyscraper suspended by invisible cables the illusory reality is breathtaking. Li Wei also puts his head through a mirror with a hole in it and stands in public squares or on pylons in Venice the reflected images meshing with his own in a layered message where superimpositions of real and reflected images seem to fuse together.
And what is the message. His messages like his works scream with meaning of modern man’s blindness to the social problems of today. Like an ostrich, his head is sheltered by Mother earth, the origin of everything, while the world outside bursts into shameful and hopeless conflicts. Li Wei would like to make you think and through his shocking performances he would like you to think about contemporary problems.
Among the works exhibited, there are his latest photos, which belong to the performance “A Pause for Humanity”. Together with his beloved wife and daughter, he climbs to the top of a tall building under construction. In the contemporary ever increasingly degraded situation, Li Wei warns humanity about prompt danger, while he challenges himself by inviting people to return to their social nucleus and roots, and, from there, meditate about where all this will lead us, the human race.
