Liu Shuwei

Supported by Louis Vuitton, the exhibition develops from the artist’s photographic work for the new edition of Louis Vuitton Fashion Eye Shanghai. Expanding his lens from familiar urban scenes to the intimate realms where body, memory, and personal perception intersect, Liu engages in a profound exploration of modes of seeing and the boundaries of the image through photography, light and kinetic installations and material experiments.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

As an artist active at the forefront of contemporary photography, Liu Shuwei has garnered widespread acclaim for his acute visual language and experimental approach. Moving fluidly from photography to moving images, installations, and organic materials, Liu continually investigates how individuals perceive, comprehend, and establish delicate connections with the surrounding world.

In Liu’s photographic practice, the familiar often reveals a subtle strangeness, while the most mundane details open up unexpected realms. As curator Victoria Jonathan writes, “Taking Shanghai as both a point of departure and a recurring presence, Spiral Echoes unfolds as a movement between outer and inner landscapes.” Everyday details captured by the artist are transformed into estranged visual experiences: shadows imply presence, reflections construct landscapes, and the boundaries between objects dissolve. Through these works, the artist invites viewers not merely to recognize the subject matter, but to rethink the act of seeing itself.

Bringing together multiple bodies of work, the exhibition showcases the fluidity of photography across various contexts and mediums. In Shanghai in Drawers of Light, urban imagery is layered and illuminated across translucent acrylic panels, creating a visual structure of mutual concealment and revelation. Visible Darkness traces the color blue, stemming from the artist’s experience of self-isolation and his fear of losing sight. Meanwhile, Tides, yes, breathing blurs the boundary between the human body and natural landscapes, turning the body into a landscape while endowing the scenery with a sense of vitality.

In its more intimate chapters, the exhibition shifts toward the artist’s studio, bodily, and psychological spaces. Liu transfers photographic imagery onto active or unconventional materials—such as SCOBY (the gelatinous membrane formed during kombucha fermentation), gelatin, resin, and readymades, allowing the images to be continuously altered by their material hosts. These works assume ambiguous forms suspended between skin, shell, and living organism. As Jonathan writes, “The photographic image seems to acquire a life beyond representation: its surface becomes a site of continuous transformation, where even stillness suggests movement.” The exhibition concludes with Vanishing Act, where human silhouettes emerge and dissolve within their surroundings, hovering between presence and absence.

Jonathan describes Spiral Echoes as “neither a linear journey nor a closed circle”; it follows “a movement of departures and returns, of proximity and distance, in which inner and outer worlds continually reshape one another.” Through multi-dimensional visual and material practices, the exhibition guides viewers to re-examine a world that is at once familiar and uncanny, opening up a renewed encounter with the very act of "seeing."

ABOUT ARTIST

Liu Shuwei lives and works in Shanghai. He uses the medium of photography and moving images as the core of his practice, allowing them to expand into diverse material and installation-based forms. In his practice, he focuses on how we face fears and changes in life, capturing the intersections of the present within a cycle of constant vanishing.Through carefully constructed narrative frameworks and perceptual rhythms, he explores how the experience of time can be extended—or even altered—through the act of viewing.

His solo exhibitions include “Vanishing Act” (Maison Ming in Hong Kong, 2025),“Tides, yes, breathing” (Photo Saint Germain in Paris, 2024) and “Blue Trilogy” (Vu Photo in Quebec City, 2017). He has participated in institutional group shows: Palais de Tokyo, the Power Station of Art, the Shanghai Rockbund Art Museum, the PHmuseum, and the Jimei × Arles International Photo Festival. He has been selected as a finalist for the Three Shadows Photography Award and the Lensculture Portrait Award, and in 2019 he was named one of the “Ones to Watch” by the British Journal of Photography. Liu has participated in residency programs such as the Vermont Studio Center and the Aranya Art Center. His works have been featured in the New York Times, i-D, Leap, and Artforum, among other publications.

ABOUT CURATOR

Victoria Jonathan is a French curator, editor, and cultural producer whose work explores the intersections of contemporary art, cultural heritage, and collective memory. Based between France and China, she is the founder of Doors, a curatorial agency through which she has developed and curated exhibitions and artistic projects across Asia, North Africa, and Europe, in collaboration with leading artists and cultural institutions.

A graduate of Columbia University and La Sorbonne, she has spent over a decade working closely with China’s contemporary art and photography scenes, collaborating with artists including Ding Yi, Lin Tianmiao, Yin Xiuzhen, Wu Jian'an, and Huang Rui, and photographers such as RongRong, Feng Li, Luo Yang, 223, and Liu Shuwei.

Previously co-director of Jimei × Arles, the Chinese sister festival of Les Rencontres d'Arles, she established China's first award dedicated to women photographers. She also contributed to A World History of Women Photographers (Textuel / Thames & Hudson).

Recent projects include A Sense of Touch, presented by la Galerie du 19M / Chanel at the Museum of Art Pudong, Shanghai (2026), for which she served as curatorial and editorial advisor. She was also guest editor of a special issue of LEAP published in conjunction with the Centre Pompidou's China: A New Generation of Artists exhibition (2024), and guest curator of Menart Fair in Paris (2025).

She is the author and editor of Louis Vuitton Fashion Eye Shanghai and curator of Liu Shuwei's solo exhibition Spiral Echoes at Fotografiska Shanghai (2026).

ABOUT LOUIS VUITTON FASHION EYE SHANGHAI

Celebrating the art of travel since 1854, Louis Vuitton continues to uphold its spirit of adventure. A natural fit for the soul of travel, photography is an evident form of expression for Louis Vuitton, whose editorial process makes sure that the book is granted the status of a medium in its own right, with the singular aim of continually renewing its visual vocabulary. Fashion Eye is a tailor-made series: each type of paper or binding, each layout, and sometimes even the printing processes used, in keeping with artisanal tradition, serve the title at hand. For a book is first and foremost the work of an author, a designer and a printer. This autumn, on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of this photographic album collection, Louis Vuitton launches a new edition of Fashion Eye Shanghai, featuring Liu Shuwei’s poetic lens that wandered the streets of shanghai capturing the exquisite beauty of ordinary things.