What is liu Xiaodong known for?
Liu Xiaodong is a contemporary Chinese artist best known for his involvement in the Neo-Realist movement in China during the 1990s. Throughout his painting practice, Liu explores the conceptual aspect of documenting the developing economy of China as well as, more recently, Egypt. He lives and works in Beijing, China.
What materials does liu Xiaodong use?
He brings his equipment – large-scale canvases and a temporary tarpaulin, camera, paint, diaries, drawings, sketches. Painting en plain air, among the people he portrays and being close to situations he wants to capture, creates a sense of interconnection that can be recognized on his paintings.
How does Liu Xiaodong work?
Liu is primarily a Figurative painter, capturing snapshots of time with his richly-colored works and interesting use of framing and perspective. His subjects are often common people and those at the margins of society, such as sex workers and the homeless.
Is Liu Xiaodong married?
Born in 1963, Liu graduated from The Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing with a BFA in 1988 and an MFA in 1995, and is considered a representative of China’s ‘New Generation’ of artists, along with his wife, the figurative painter Yu Hong.
What kind of artist is Liu Xiaodong?
In conversation, Liu Xiaodong wants it known that he is as much a neo-realist as he is a documentary film-maker and diarist. For him, everything comes about as a consequence of his being present at a specific place, within a given period of time, and in circumstances that allows him to almost forensically conceive of new works.
Why did Liu Xiaodong paint the Hotan project?
Consequently, Xiaodong’s work proved to be a catalyst for an alternative look at a province otherwise plagued by natural disasters. In a similar vein to Xiaodong’s Hotan Project, two of the artist’s leading paintings from 2010 were born of his documentary style need to reinterpret China ’s recent history.
Where was the earthquake that Liu Xiaodong was painting?
The painting has as its backdrop the aftermath of the seismic earthquake in 2008 in Beichuan, central China, in which hundreds of thousands lost their lives, and where a smaller quake occurred again in 2013.
What does Liu Xiaodong do with natural disasters?
Visually, then, it appears that Xiaodong tries to reason with the aftermath, as the nature and the condition of a disaster becomes a visible scare upon the landscape, and upon the lives of generations of people.