Liu Xiaodong was born in 1963 in Liaoning, China. He is the most outstanding realist painter in China. He has brought back to the reality of China the artistic atmosphere that Chinese artists have been focusing on the ideological expression and the imitation of Western modernist painting since the 1980s. Liu Xiaodong likes to paint things around him. Those natural, simple, plain and friendly figures are his inexhaustible source of inspiration, which is matched with keen observation and superb painting expression.

Liu Xiaodong participated in the 47th Venice Biennale and exhibited at the Guggenheim and the Bern Museum.