Biography:

Liu Xiaodong (b. 1963, Liaoning Province) is an oil painter and teaches at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.

Liu received his B.A. and M.F.A. from the Department of Oil Painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1985 and 1995, respectively. Early on in his career, during the late 1980s, Liu developed his signature style of oil paintings, which has been described as neo-academicism.

Some of his earliest group exhibitions were ‘Sketch’ (Beijing, 1988), the ‘China/Avant-Garde Exhibition’ (National Art Museum of China, Beijing, 1989), the ‘Annual Exhibition of Chinese Oil Painting’ and ‘20^th-Century China’ (Beijing, 1991). In 1992, Liu was the art director for the movie Beijing Bastards, and the following year, director Wang Xiaoshi cast him in the lead role of the movie The Days. Since 1994, Liu has been teaching at the Department of Oil Painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.