Liu Wei’s largest solo show to date deals with two main visual tropes—the horizon and the city. The first monumental sculpture we are confronted with is a megalopolis bristling with corporate towers perched high upon a bare rock, guarded further by a broad building in the shape of China’s national parliament, the Great Hall of the People. Made with compressed books to create a stripy strata that transverses the city and its rocky rampart, the relationship between China’s parliament and the massive commercial citadel behind it are thus successfully camouflaged. The stripes of the book pages are echoed in Meditation No.2 (2010) a painting in which a series of light and dark grey layers is intersected by a light pink line of the emerging (or receding) sunlight on the horizon. The perfect flatness of this painting is juxtaposed with the verticality of the urban sculpture in front of it. Liu Wei’s new flat and empty horizon paintings—introduced for the first time in this show—follow a series called Purple Air that he employed to explore urban verticality over the last five years. The last painting of this series (of approximately 60 works) is displayed in a small antechamber leading to the main …