Wk 5 – Artists OTW – Lady Pink & Liu Wei

     Lady Pink is a graffiti artist who paints bright and colorful work. From her website, most of her work on trains is paintings of names, whether its people or groups, or just her own. Although, there is one painting of Stimpy from the cartoon The Ren & Stimpy Show. When you google her name and graffiti, you see a lot of colorful artwork that could be political, cultural, or religious. There are also lots of other work that doesn't seem like they have a specific meaning to me, but rather just expressions of her creativity. Her work does seem like what I'd expect from street art though in the sense that their art is colorful and explosive. Liu Wei is an artist from Beijing that does paintings and sculptures. His website says that in his early works he did a lot of political paintings about his skepticism, but perhaps it's just my lack of political knowledge, but I don't quite see it. His political paintings generally have a Chinese military man facing to the left and some kind of person or scene in the background. His older paintings in general aren't realistic looking paintings, but they're actually a little messy looking. He doesn't paint straight or concise lines, so his paintings kind of look like if you painted a blurry picture. His newer paintings that I saw have sharper lines, but it still looks like something is moving. For example, his Tiananmen and Purple Air paintings have a video static effect of them. 

    Both of their art are similar in the fact that they both did political paintings and others that are part of their culture. Both of their art used a lot of color, but Lady Pink used really bright colors that attract your attention while Wei used more muted colors. Wei's art isn't as sharp as Lady Pink's is either. His work is very much like other contemporary artwork where he focuses on his ideas and what he's trying to express rather than the aesthetic of his work. I think Lady Pink does both. I included images of both their artworks to show the difference between their art styles. 

Lady Pink's "United States of America"

Liu Wei's "Dad in Front of the TV"

    The difference between street art and gallery work is, to me, that gallery art will have more muted colors, be more mysterious about the concept (they make you really look and think about it), and a lot of it is not traditional in what I think most people would consider amazing art. Street art is more pleasing to the eye for normal people on the streets, more bright, eyecatching, and usually expresses their concepts and ideas straightforwardly rather than making you think about it. The strengths of gallery art is that it attracts a lot of rich people and makes them more interested in the concept, so if you have something really important, it reaches more powerful people. The weakness is that, from what I've seen, a lot of fine art or gallery art is seen as pretentious so it doesn't reach as much normal people. The strengths of street art is that the art style is eyecatching so it attracts more people, which means more people would see the message if they had a specific one to say. A weakness is that street art is more looked down on because of vandalizers and that they make be in areas that people just drive or walk by without looking at. Personally, I think street art looks nicer so it's more appealing for me to do street art than gallery art. Also, in order to be added to a gallery, you have to follow their rules and art styles, while street art allows for more creative freedom.