CUHK Artist-in-Residence 2024

A central figure on the scene of contemporary Chinese art since the early 1990s, Liu Xiaodong (1963-) is best known for his masterful oil paintings depicting everyday life with a keen sense of humor and expressive realism. In the early 2000s, he began conducting large-scale painting projects on location and transformed traditional en-plein-air practices into what art historian Wu Hung describes as “painting in action”, a process comparable to the making of an art film. Over the past decades, Liu Xiaodong steadily expanded his vision and traveled around the world, from Xinjiang to Singapore, from Havana to Jerusalem, from Rome to New York, to study and depict different people and landscapes, creating an extraordinarily rich collection of paintings that is unique in its scale, symbolism, and global resonances.

Liu Xiaodong has exhibited his work in solo shows at world-class venues such as UCCA Shanghai and Beijing, the Faurschau Foundation in New York, Dallas Contemporary, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and NRW Forum in Germany, and Palazzo Strozzi-Strozzina in Italy. Many museums and art institutions, including M+ in Hong Kong, have collected his paintings.