Liu Sheng 劉聲 China, b. 1971

Liu Sheng grew up in a rural farming village in Suixi County in Zhanjiang, an area stricken by poverty located in the southwest of Guangdong province in China. Liu studied oil painting at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1994. He currently lives in Beipo Village of Suixi County.

Born in 1971, Liu Sheng experienced China’s industrial revolution and the drastic social transformations of rapid urbanization. As the first university graduate and breadwinner of the family, Liu took on jobs in design and manufacturing to lift his family out of poverty, from 1994 to 2014. This survival experience of marginalized people hustling in changing cities, made Liu very different from artists that start practicing professionally straight out of art school.

A migrant worker was Liu Sheng’s identity for two decades, but he never stopped questioning the boundary of art and society. In 2014, he no longer wanted to be a mere observer and started documenting his daily encounters. From 2014 to 2019, Liu Sheng delved into the social landscape of ‘urban villages’ in the Pearl River Delta. Through depicting the state of existence of these migrants, the artist attempts to document how China’s economic revolution transformed the country’s domestic sphere.

Late 2019, Liu Sheng returned to his home village and rented two acres of farmland from his cousin which began his life as a ‘Potato Man’. Liu explores the intimate choices of village families in the face of larger forces of modernization, showing how these negotiations shape the configurations of daily village life — from power structure, communal superstitions, individualism vs collectivism, to resources distribution and inequalities.

Long-durational social practice is not only a way for Liu Sheng to transcend his own observation and perception, to generate artistic expression in the joint relationship with others, but to expose critical issues within existing systems and catalyze social exchange.