3 works by Liu Sheng are part of I'll Catch You Later, a group exhibition at the Guangdong Times Museum co-curated by Jiawen Li and Liang Jianhua.
I'll Catch You Later
Exhibition period: 19 September 2026 - 31 January 2027
Venue: Guangdong Times Museum
The exhibition examines emerging shifts in painting rooted in lived experience. Moving between reality and imagination, the artists draw on music, popular culture, local life, and public space, with practices that remain in flux rather than fixed into stable styles. Titled I'll Catch You Later, the exhibition frames painting as a space for renewed agency amid fragmented information and realities that resist single explanations, stepping outside ready-made narratives to reconnect with one's surroundings.
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Born in 1971, Liu Sheng came of age during China's industrial boom and rapid urbanization. Two decades as a migrant worker shaped his understanding of marginal survival, prompting him to document daily life in urban villages and trace how economic transformation reshaped domestic experience. In late 2019, Liu returned to his home village, rented two acres of farmland, and began a long-term practice examining how rural families negotiate modernization.
The three paintings in this exhibition, Burning Cane Stalks (2023), Summer Breeze (2024), and Woman with a Sickle (2024), grow out of this return to rural life as a lived, bodily reality. Through agricultural labor, Liu reaches a more immediate understanding of village life, allowing the sensations of working the soil, heat, fatigue, rhythm, and duration to feed back into painting. He captures the plain presence of the countryside: a man burning cane stalks in the field, a woman harvesting with a sickle, and men resting in a hanging bed as summer air moves through the subtropical landscape of southwestern Guangdong.
Learn more --
https://www.timesmuseum.org/en
