DOU WEI

Dou Wei (Lijing Wei, b. 1994) is an artist whose practice centers on material ontology, cultural memory, and liminal states of biological and constructed form. Working primarily through painting, her work investigates moments of contact between highly regulated artificial systems and unstable organic structures, revealing tensions between imposed order and natural logic.

Her paintings employ strategies of heterogeneous equivalence that weaken material hierarchies and destabilize classificatory systems. Objects appear in states of “afterlife,” detached from their intended functions and repositioned within ambiguous spatial relationships. Shadows operate as material extensions, while tools and containers lose their reliability, loosening anthropocentric modes of perception and opening toward a decentralized field of existence.

Earlier working across installation and moving image, Dou continues her inquiry into nature and artifice within her painting practice. Animals, plants, human figures, and crafted remnants are stretched and reconfigured between figuration and abstraction, functioning less as symbols than as sites where meaning is delayed, collapsed, and reorganized.

Born in China, Dou received her MFA from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Beijing, in 2021. She is currently based in K’jipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and has presented her work internationally, including recent solo and group exhibitions in Montreal, Veliko Tarnovo, Beijing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou.