His works include the Super Structure series of model cityscapes constructed from dog chews; the Purple Air oil paintings of stylised skyscraper cityscapes; the Landscape Series of landscapes made from photographic composites of human buttocks; and Indigestion II, a two-metre model turd.
He has shown work in exhibitions including 21: World Wide Video Festival in Amsterdam, Cinema du Reel at the Pompidou Centre in France, Over One Billion Served at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, and Between Past and Future at the International Center for Photography in New York City.
Art trends that had been popular in the early 1990s, such as political pop and cynical realism, seemed outdated and ineffective to many of the younger generation artists.
[6] The 1999 show "Post-sense, Sensibility, Alien Bodies and Delusion" in Shaoyaoju, Beijing, was one that included artists from all over China, notorious for visceral sculptures of human and animal corpses, "borrowed" cadavers juxtaposed with stillborn fetus, severed human arms hanging from meat hooks, and the sounds of a goose, starving to death with its feet glued to the floor.
Art series such as Anti-Matter (2006) and As Long as I See It (2006) are composed of household objects like washing machines, exhaust fans, and televisions, many of which have been altered, cut out, or “blown apart” by some unspeakable force.
The works demand that, even as new technologies and machines produce new and more ephemeral types of knowledge, humans acknowledge the forms of the everyday objects.
In 2006, Liu began hiring nearby villagers to assist with the artworks and the number of workers in his studio has continued multiplying.
Even Liu's representational paintings are digitally generated by the artist and then transferred to a canvas, where they are filled in by studio workers.
[5] However, despite Liu Wei's studio work, he has chosen to stop short of mechanizing his artwork, apparently preferring the slight imperfections that come from human hands.
In sculpture, Liu Wei asserts even less control, which are put together in sections by workers who follow short verbal instructions.
[5] His artworks and installations are produced through a process of tinkering as workers add and manipulate the forms in a theatrical experience.
"[4] Rather than beginning with a material or a technique, Liu Wei brings his artistic endeavors with ideas and then considers how best to express them.
"Actually, there is always still something beneath," he has said, "But I could never use some surface things – for example, the way lots of artists use a representative form, almost like a symbol or emblem – as a way to define my work, or to prove that I had a style of position.
It is through continually moving from one style and material to another that Liu Wei perceives his artwork as maintaining interest.
[9] The photograph was entered and accepted in the Shanghai Biennale after organizers of the exhibition requested he make adjustments to his original submission idea, a train car on a rotating turntable.
Despite the subject matter, the organizers of the Shanghai Biennale were pleased with the traditional Chinese tone of the work and accepted it into the exhibition.
[9] Mixed Media 83 x 214 x 89 cm Indigestion is meters-high pile of excrement made of tar, one of the petrochemical industry's residual products.
On closer inspection, one can see that the indigestible "kernels" of the excrement are actually hundreds of toy soldiers, airplanes, and instruments of war.
is an urban city scene of miniature buildings composed from pieces of dried gut, the type sold in pet shops for dogs to chew on.