The Metropolitan Museum of Art has selected Liu Wei, an artist who lives in Beijing, to create sculptures for its Facade Commission — a tradition that started in 2019 as part of an effort to bring contemporary art to a museum better known for its Egyptian sarcophagi and European classical paintings.
“People can expect something quite bold and complex,” said the curator Lesley Ma, who invited Liu for the commission in January and started meeting with him a couple of months later to brainstorm for the project. The artwork will eventually fill four niches on the Met’s Beaux-Arts facade with new works.
“I felt that he would be a good artist for us to engage in,” Ma said. “Not only from his work, but also because we haven’t worked with an artist from mainland China for a long time.” The piece is scheduled to go on display in the fall of 2026.
Liu said that he was excited but overwhelmed by the honor. “The work has to be extraordinary,” the artist said over email. “Art has zero tolerance for mediocrity.”
The last time the Met featured a solo project of a contemporary artist from China was in 2006, when Cai Guo-Qiang presented sculptures on the museum’s rooftop, including a limestone frieze, a glass wall with stuffed birds and two cast-resin crocodiles, as well as daily fireworks explosions. Around that time, Ma was a studio assistant for Cai and had met Liu when he was featured in the inaugural China Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2005, which Cai also curated.
Since joining the Met in 2022, Ma has brought many contemporary artists from Asia into the spotlight of the encyclopedic museum. Last year, she selected Tong Yang-Tze, an artist from Taiwan, to create giant calligraphy paintings for the museum’s Great Hall. She was also in charge of that year’s Facade Commission, which went to the South Korean artist Lee Bul, whose sculptures often contain references to classical and futuristic bodies.
Despite their different backgrounds, Lee and Liu share some similarities. At the time of Lee’s commission, both artists were represented by the Lehmann Maupin gallery, and had been included in group exhibitions together. (A museum spokeswoman noted that the artists are also represented by other galleries.) Both artists have created sculptures of imaginary cityscapes and thought about the future of technology.
“In an era dominated by data, algorithms and A.I., I hope visitors can rediscover the once-mysterious depth of human bodies and emotions — the genuine feelings that come from chance and contingency,” said Liu, 53, who plans on using ready-mades or industrial materials for the project.
Liu was born in the middle of the Cultural Revolution but spent his formative years in a period when China was reopening to the world. In 1999, he joined a group of young artists who used a basement in a Beijing residential building for an exhibition called “Post-Sense Sensibility: Alien Bodies and Delusion,” which energized the country’s experimental art scene. Liu exhibited a multichannel video, “Hard to Restrain,” which featured a group of his friends, naked and scurrying around a room like frantic insects.
In 2004, he surprised the organizers of the Shanghai Biennale with a new work after his proposal of a mini-retrospective encountered some complications. He submitted “Landscape,” a mural-size photograph that resembled the moody mountains of a Chinese scroll — only the terrain was created by an assemblage of naked and hairy buttocks.
“Many of these kinds of expressions were meant to counteract the previous idealism of Chinese contemporary art, when everything you did had to have its roots in something even more majestic,” Liu said in a video by M+ Museum in Hong Kong, which acquired the photograph. “At the time, everything was open in terms of the market, the government or any other aspect. Nothing seemed to be restricted, and there was less counterreaction.”
Over the last decade, Liu has had exhibitions at the Long Museum in Shanghai and the Cleveland Art Museum.
The commission at the Met comes at a moment of tension between the United States and China over trade policies. Museum officials said there have been no issues so far with organizing the show or securing visas for the artist’s team.
Liu himself sees the project as a gift to the world. “The greatest respect I can show the audience is to express myself authentically,” he said.
Through June 9, 2026, Jeffrey Gibson, a Native artist, is transforming the niches with giant parkland animals, including a squirrel holding an acorn, a deer and coyote.
Zachary Small is a Times reporter writing about the art world’s relationship to money, politics and technology.
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