Liu Xiaodong is born in 1963 in Liaoning; he lives and works in Beijing. He studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where he teaches today. After graduating in 1995 he studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid. He belongs to a generation of Chinese painters, called the “New Generation”, who use a figurative style to represent different facets of contemporary Chinese society. Appropriating the spontaneity and on-the-spot immediacy of photography, Liu Xiaodong’s painting subtly interrogates the world of work of a country embracing a forced-march capitalism – a world of work which inevitably proves to have violent consequences for certain categories of contemporary Chinese society.