Liu Xiaodong

Liu Xiaodong is among the many Chinese artists who have had to re-establish their bearings within shifting social conditions. His work borrows from the formal language of Socialist Realism and conventional documentary media to capture people’s daily lives and individual destinies in the context of radical change. The departure point for his project The Process of Painting at the Kunsthaus Graz was the Upper Styrian iron-ore mining town Eisenerz, a place steeped in tradition and which became a kind of global model. Liu Xiaodong lived and worked there for a month, depicting its structural changes in a way that is not aggressive, but rather documentary in nature. Disciplines such as reportage, visual anthropology and pleinair painting combine to form the overall visual design evident in Liu Xiaodong’s artistic practice, which gives significant impetus to painting today and increases its relevance as a medium.