Liu Xiaodong

Liu Xiaodong is an artist of the everyday and the ordinary. He is also an internationally exhibited artist who, in his own words, paints and travels ‘to experience the complexity of the world’. His paintings are layered with meaning and commentary that speak to global issues such as the displacement of people, environmental crises, social unrest, and political and economic upheaval.

Liu grew up in humble surroundings in rural China during the Cultural Revolution. He rose to prominence as a leading figure in Chinese Neo-Realism during the 1990s, at a time when contemporary Chinese art was becoming internationally recognized for its pointed social commentary. Liu received his BFA in 1988 and MFA in 1995, both in painting, from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, where he is currently a tenured professor.

Liu seeks to capture people and society as they are through representational figurative painting; a style that stands in strong contrast to the didactic, idealized aesthetics found in the Socialist Realist murals of Mao’s Communist regime, and a challenge to the state’s promotion of a socialist utopia. He often begins work on site, en plein air, then moving to his studio where he uses photographs as source imagery to recreate moments, also including imagined elements that lend to his messaging and blur the lines between fiction and reality. His loose brushstrokes and raw painterly hand perhaps speak to the nature of the lives of the subjects he chooses to paint: migrants, asylum seekers, laborers, and miners living on the margins of society, both in and outside of China, often itinerant and surviving hand to mouth.

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Liu found himself stranded with his family in New York. He had traveled to the city to meet his wife and daughter and was to head home when all flights to China were canceled. Liu had come from the U.S. Texas border with Mexico, where he had been working on large en-plein-air paintings for an upcoming solo show documenting life in communities on both sides of the Rio Grande River.

During this uncertain and extraordinary time in New York, Liu began a new body of work, Spring in New York (2020), a series of intimate watercolor paintings on paper with corresponding diary entries. Five of these watercolors are presented in HT22 at the Honolulu Museum of Art. The selection begins with two views from the artist’s balcony during the lockdown in April 2020. Fast-forward to June, and Liu depicts demonstrators who took to the streets to protest police brutality against Black people alongside those enjoying the reopening of city parks and other public spaces.