LIU XIAODONG

Early Years

Born in Jincheng in 1963 (where his parents worked in the town’s paper mill), Liu graduated from The Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing with a BFA in 1988 and an MFA in 1995. He trained in Socialist Realism—a Chinese-government-prescribed movement linked to the values of the country’s Communist Party—but rejected its propagandistic connotations, instead transcribing its formal style to snapshots of everyday life around the world. Liu still lives and works in Beijing, and teaches painting at CAFA.

Liu Xiaodong: Artworks

Liu Xiaodong’s complex, large-scale, figurative paintings are rooted in life. He often works en plein air, using impressionist techniques, loose brushstrokes and thick, impasto applications of oil paint. He also draws inspiration from Chinese scroll paintings. The empathy in his forms comes from his immersion in the communities he is painting, whether in Greenland, at China’s Three Gorges Dam, Israel-Palestinian conflict zones, the US-Mexico border or during Manhattan in the Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020. Liu keeps diaries of his trips, and beside the human figures Liu Xiaodong depicts are subtle indicators of socio-economic upheaval. Talking to Ocula in 2016, he said: “I only go into other people’s lives to experience them... I don’t want to summarise; I don’t want to make a political stance. I want to just faithfully reproduce other people’s lives.” He has also been the subject of documentaries following his work.

• Out of Beichuan (2010), depicts seven young women in an earthquake-ravaged Sichuan. While the women are rendered with careful, distinctive features, the hills and piles of rubble behind them are painted with chunky, staccato strokes.
• Hotbed (2014) is a mammoth, five-part series of paintings depicting workers at the Three Gorges Dam in China. Labourers wear barely any clothes and where corners of the canvas are blank, it’s because Liu ran out of paint.
• Xiaojun and Xiuling (2015) depicts two figures in pink, fleshy paint, while the impervious highway and sky behind them are rendered in dull greys, contrasting vibrant life with impartial infrastructure.
• Weight of Insomnia (2016) was a mechanised installation in which robotic arms rendered blue-painted images fed from security cameras in three locations in China. Rather than painting himself, he explored technology’s rendering of time.
• In Host (2025), Liu Xiaodong chose a single focus: John Mcintyre, a Detroit tattoo artist and member of a local medieval fighting club.

Liu Xiaodong: Exhibitions

Select Solo Exhibitions

• Host, Lisson Gallery, Los Angeles (2026)
• The River Divides, The World Connects, Taikang Art Museum, Beijing (2025)
• Borders, Dallas Contemporary, Dallas (2021)
• Liu Xiaodong: Your Friends, UCCA Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2021)
• Liu Xiaodong: Expedition to Uummannaq, Greenland, Louisiana Museum of Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (2019)

Select Group Exhibitions

• Buddha | Nature: Five Dialogues on Our Shared World, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas (2026)
• What About the Art? Contemporary Art from China, Qatar Museums Gallery, Al Riwaq (2016)
• Alors, la Chine? (Well then, China?), Pompidou Centre, Paris (2003)

Further Reading

• Liu Xiaodong’s profile page at Lisson Gallery
• Liu Xiaodong’s Spring in New York diary (2020)
• Liu Xiaodong’s Instagram
• Liu Xiaodong visits art students at Princeton (2024)
• Liu Xiaodong in conversation with Ocula, 2016
• Liu Xiaodong talks to Ocula, 2013

Liu Xiaodong FAQs

Ocula