Liu Xiaodong

Few artists capture today’s world with as much intimacy as Liu Xiaodong. The Beijing-based figurative painter has portrayed ordinary people in the rural corners and urban centres of his native China, including the autonomous regions of Tibet and Xinjiang, as well as around the world, from Cuba to Greenland, Iceland to Thailand. Born in 1963 in a small industrial town in north-eastern China’s Liaoning province, Liu moved to Beijing aged 17 to study painting at the Central Academy of Fine Art, where he is now a professor.

Earlier this year at London’s Lisson Gallery, he showed paintings from the Weight of Insomnia series, made by a robotic arm programmed to reproduce live-streamed images from surveillance cameras in locations such as Trafalgar Square and Gwangju’s May 18 Democracy Square, the site of the 1980 uprising against the South Korean military government.

They are a conceptual and stylistic departure from the paintings by Liu’s own hand, which capture farmers and factory workers, prostitutes and art collectors with the same sympathetic gaze and bold strokes. But at the root of it all is a documentary impulse that parallels Liu’s involvement with China’s independent cinema from the early 1990s. Liu and his wife, the artist Yu Hong, played dissolute young artists in The Days (1993), the debut film of Wang Xiaoshuai, and that same year he provided art direction for Zhang Yuan’s classic Beijing Bastards.

Liu has continued working with filmmakers to document his paintings and subjects around the world, making more than 20 films. His collaborations with Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-Hsien and China’s Jia Zhangke, respectively Liu Xiaodong: Hometown Boy (2010) and Dong (2006), are being screened in the Film section of Art Basel in Hong Kong, as is Yang Bo’s documentary On the Riverbanks of Berlin (2018) about Liu’s works made in the city last year.