Wk 11 — Artist OTW — Student Choice

Artist: Liu Xiaodong

Media: Painting

Website: https://www.artsy.net/artist/liu-xiaodong

Social Media: N/A

Liu Xiaodong is a contemporary Chinese artist involved with the Neo-Realist movement in China during the 90s. He explores the conceptual aspect of the economy of China and Egypt. Liu was born in 1963 in Liaoning, China. For his education, he studied at both the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Complutense in Madrid. Liu has exhibited his paintings with Lisson Gallery in London and Mary Boone Gallery in New York. His work is currently being held in museums like the Singapore Art Museum, the Shanghai Art Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Liu’s form of art resembles life itself. Since he draws a lot of people, he often uses lots of colors that resemble the color of skin or teeth of a person. His portraits are also like pictures so he adds as much detail as he can when it comes to the scenery behind a person like his piece “Betel nut beauty” that he made in 2002. In that piece, he used lots of thick brushstrokes in order to create the field of tall grass that we see the lady in. I’ve also found out that whenever he paints a person, he usually paints a person of Asian descent rather than of African American, Hispanic, or Caucasian.

The main question that I always want to ask an artist, if I ever were to meet one, is “why do they make the art that they do?” The reason why Liu makes art was because he likes the realism of people and showing the story of a person in each painting that he makes of each person. He has also said before that he wants to capture their environment and their living state. And the artist he is mainly influenced by is the famed British painter Lucian Freud.

I can resonate with this artist because there are times that I look around at people and wonder about their life stories. It mainly happens with criminals that you see on TV like on the news. Or it can be with the kids that I’ve seen at high school ditching class or just acting up in class. My approach is more of a sympathetic thing because I feel bad for the person that they became. I say this because as we grow up we have our innocence and we become good people, and it is only the people around us that can turn us into bad people. I have my own way of painting a person’s story, I just don’t share it.