Liu Wei’s Cut-Up and Reassembled Sculptures Take Over the Met Museum’s Facade

A series of hybrid sculptures now gesture from the facade of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. In Speculation / Λ (2026), a black sphere acts as the support for a hand that extends upward, as if trapped in a ruin of bone tissue, while in Speculation / G (2026), an outstretched hand lies at the base of a tower of protruding nails, rawhide, and layered geometric metal cutouts. Conceived of by Liu Wei and unveiled Thursday, the works range from nearly 9 feet tall to over 16 feet tall. Imposing in scale, they look like a group of anti-monuments when seen together.

Fabricated in a range of materials, including rawhide, resin, fiberglass composite, bronze, aluminum alloy, steel, each mixed-media sculpture feels fragmented and unstable, its final form a chimera of different origins: biological, technological, architectural. “I want them to feel like objects born out of a wasteland,” Liu told me during a visit to his Beijing studio in June.

At one point during my second visit, while we sat by his computer to look at the studies for these complex sculptures, his mouse stopped working. He took it as an opportunity to talk about the genesis of his artmaking. He began using computers right after he graduated from the China Academy of Art in 1996; an early machine that he built around 2000 had four drives working simultaneously. On it, he spent over a month piecing together a massive composite image of pictures from urban life. “I remember finishing it at 5 a.m., and then the system crashed,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep after that. I was going out of my mind.”

His computer has been upgraded since, but his process remains the same. For the Met commission, he layered image upon image, piecing together collages against a digital photo of the museum’s facade in Photoshop, before translating them into small 3D maquettes. He objects to sending a blueprint to a fabricator. “That would turn it into a commodity,” he said matter-of-factly. For the Met project, he worked with a team of 13 assistants and specialists, who weren’t given strict instructions. “I give them a framework, then review and adjust things later,” he said. “It’s not about adhering to a preconceived, complete image.”

Over the summer, during my first visit to Liu’s studio, he had already scaled-up his maquettes using an oil-based clay to produce a cast. He had just marked out cut lines on the clay’s surface, where he planned to slice the model apart, then piece it back together using different materials, recalling a technique he’s been familiar with since childhood.

Born in 1972, Liu came of an age when material abundance represented hope and manufacturing ramped up, with slab-style apartment blocks proliferating. His parents, both surgeons, moved around a lot and Liu would often get bored, turning to drawing to pass the time. Liu’s mother would influence her middle son’s future art career in another important way, buying him books and magazines about art, some of which introduced him to the work of figures like Diego Rivera and Andy Warhol.

Even before he started university, Liu knew he wouldn’t continue oil painting, though that was his major and the prevailing aesthetic was still realism. His school surprisingly had a tradition of not being deferential to one’s professors; Liu recalled a teacher trying to bribe students with a pack of cigarettes to get them to attend class. The school was a cradle for avant-garde art in China: Yang Fudong was a year ahead of him, while video artist Zhang Peili had graduated from the oil painting department a decade earlier. Liu played soccer, drank, and skipped class. But after he graduated, unwilling to ask his parents for money, and, as he put it, “so broke I couldn’t afford lightbulbs,” he buckled down to work.

From 1998, Liu began to explore the conceptual approach of making an incision—creating something akin to a wound. He’d cut things out, photograph them, then manipulate the image. He applied this to readymades in his “Antimatter” series (2006) comprised of remixed appliances from the homes of migrant workers, who crafted these objects from whatever materials they could get their hands on. “I took them apart, cut them up, and put them back together, so that all their internal organs were exposed,” he said, noting that this process of disassembling and reassembling is meant to mimic capitalist modes of production.

For Liu, artmaking has never really been about making something from scratch, but about responding to things that already exist, or as he says, “rethinking, re-examining, and discerning the nature of things.” When he visits institutions like the Met, the British Museum, or the Louvre, what interests him most, even beyond artistic qualities, is the context of a given work’s creation—what drove its maker to divine it.

In our modern world, something that itself has been pieced together, he sees an analogue to his artistic approach. Technology, he said, has made an already fragmented society even more so, our sensory systems replaced by the latest gadget or app. “Society is all wrapped up, you can’t see anything,” he said. “We lose our physical sense of self, and, in reality, our capacity for emotion.”

Liu is wary of offering a neat explication for his latest installations. He did share, however, that he likes the motif of spheres because they lack inherent directionality. He is personally drawn to hands for the sense of power they convey. “Hands carry so many meanings—creation, destruction, and everything in between,” he said. Speculation / h (2026) carries biological overtones, its shape recalling a human heart, to which he has grafted fingers that almost clutch the organ. But ultimately, for Liu, the initial concept ceases to matter; the act of constructing the image itself becomes more important than the starting point.

From a distance, one side of Speculation / c (2026) looks like a premodern saint carved from rock, melted into a scream. On the other side, an index finger pointing straight to the sky suggests a warning, a call to attention. Liu’s Met commission, with its disembodied hands, its severing and suturing of the organic and the mechanical, may be a metaphor for a civilization detached from its foundations and coming to its end.

The commission’s main constraint was spatial, as each sculpture had to fit into the narrow area between two columns, measuring about 8.5 feet width. “Limitations serve as a fulcrum,” he said of the challenge. “Without them, everything loses its power.”

Even time is a limitation that Liu likes to work up against. He continued fine-tuning the sculptures right up until they were crated for shipping to New York. One of his biggest alterations, which came late in the process, were to the nails on the hands. He cut them off, made new molds, and attached them once more. He was constantly confronting the works as physical objects. “It’s much like how people are formed,” Liu said. “Just as we navigate society and encounter various forces, those experiences constantly shape who we are.”