Liu Sheng 劉聲 China, b. 1971

Liu Sheng lives and works in Beipo Village, Suixi County in Zhanjiang, a coastal city in southern China. He graduated from the Oil Painting Department of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 1994.

Liu Sheng's practice emerges from the social transformations that have reshaped China since the 1990s. Raised in rural Guangdong and later working for two decades across construction sites, factories, design firms, and small businesses, he experienced firsthand the massive migration of labor that fueled the country's economic rise. Rather than observing these changes from a distance, Liu occupied the position of those who built them.

Since returning to artistic practice in 2014, Liu has focused on the lives of workers, migrants, and rural communities caught within the uneven promises of modernization. Through painting and long-term social engagement, he examines how systems of labor, capital, and power enter the intimate spaces of everyday life. His works reveal the human realities concealed beneath narratives of growth, exposing the structures that shape visibility, dignity, and belonging.

Between 2014 and 2019, Liu developed socially engaged projects in the urban villages of the Pearl River Delta, tracing the lived consequences of rapid urbanization. In 2019, he returned to his home village in Suixi County and began “Return to Sweet Potato Farming”, an ongoing project rooted in farming, community participation, and rural observation. Living within the village, he investigates local power relations, resource distribution, collective belief systems, and the tensions between individual aspiration and communal life.

Liu's recent paintings are grounded in the physical experience of labor. Strained muscles, weathered hands, bent backs, and exhausted bodies recur throughout his work, not as symbols but as evidence. His subjects are neither ethnographic studies nor social types. They are people who share the artist's own historical condition. Rooted in the specificity of rural southern China, Liu Sheng's practice asks broader questions about labor, power, and those rendered invisible by the rhetoric of progress.