Liu Xiaodong

Chinese artist Liu Xiaodong’s (born 1963) most personally significant project to date, Shaanbei is his series on the eponymous Chinese province and birthplace of the People’s Republic of China, which Xiaodong frequented as an art student and which he revisited to paint in 2018.

For eight weeks, Chinese painter Liu Xiaodong (born 1962) embedded himself within Mexico–US border communities such as Ciudad Juárez, El Paso, Eagle Pass, Piedras Negras, Laredo and Nuevo Laredo, to capture the lives and trials of the people living there. A leading figure of Chinese Neo-Realism, Liu, in loose brushstrokes, paints everything from border agents on both sides carrying out their duties to Mexican families barbecuing on the banks of the Rio Grande. Also included in this clothbound volume are Liu’s reference photographs of these border communities; studies based on those photographs showing how he builds his compositions; and pages of his notes taken throughout his lengthy journey. Peter Doroshenko, director of the Dallas Contemporary, writes in an essay for the book: “every painting captures a decisive moment, locking individual narratives down forever, reflecting numerous cultural references that echo throughout his practice.”

Chinese artist Liu Xiaodong (born 1963) has been addressing radical shifts in society such as population displacement and environmental crisis for over three decades. This publication features a series of watercolor paintings that document the changing landscape of New York City during the height of the pandemic.

Since 2015, Chinese painter Liu Xiaodong (born 1963) has been developing a technologically radical project to create landscape paintings using robotic arms and surveillance cameras. Collectively entitled Weight of Insomnia, this series of paintings is an attempt to quantify the emotional burden carried by people moving through the seemingly ceaseless surroundings of the 24-hour city. Taking live feeds, streaming data and imagery from specific locations, Liu’s painting machine processes these real-time images of the ever-changing flow of humanity into a complex network of abstract marks on canvas, resulting in a machine-manufactured painting.

This book is the first to publish the full extent of this project through its iterations in China, Germany, the UK and Australia. The volume also includes an interview with the artist as well as Liu’s diaries written during the project’s gestation, installation shots and working documents.