The Met announced that Beijing-based artist Liu Wei has been selected for The Genesis Facade Commission in 2026.
Liu Wei is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans through painting, video, sculpture and installation. Known for his virtuosic command of sites and scale, he reconfigures fragments from the urban environment, historical sources and bodily forms to create sculptural installations that evoke awe and agitation.
For the third exhibition of The Genesis Facade Commission, Liu’s new works for the niches will play with perspective and scale and address cycles of rupture, resistance, mending and creating in history. Instead of a totalizing narrative, Liu will present composite sculptures made with a variety of materials that provoke complex feelings and reactions amid uncertainties in contemporary life.
Since the late 1990s, Liu Wei (BFA, 1996, oil painting, China Academy of Art, Hangzhou) has addressed realities of our time through a wide range of media—from photography and painting to video, sculpture, and installation. A key figure of a pioneering generation of artists from China who sought to define “conceptual art” on their own terms against the backdrop of rapid societal transformation, Liu has developed an oeuvre that challenges art historical tropes of abstraction, figuration, and the readymade. Known for his virtuosic command of sites and scale, he reconfigures fragments from the urban environment, historical sources, and bodily forms to create sculptural installations that evoke awe and agitation. With a sense of urgency, his work captures and critiques the reoccurring conflicts and contradictions in society with which we must contend.
The Genesis Facade Commission is an annual exhibition that builds upon the Museum’s contemporary art commissions on the Fifth Avenue facade since 2019. Each year, one artist is invited to create new site-specific works of art, inspiring authentic engagement between the artist, The Met's audience and the broader global art world.
Main Image: Portrait of Liu Wei: Jumbo Tsui. Courtesy of Liu Wei Studio