Young Woman in 1950s LIU BAOMIN

ARTIST

Born in 1968 in Xi'an in Shaanxi province, Liu Baomin graduated from the Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts in 1989. Liu Baomin's work eternally and anxiously questions the future of China. For this, he uses different modes of language ranging from surrealism to realism through more abstract phases.

What Liu Baomin depicts is not the appearance, the artist instills the painterly nature that has become a symbol of his contemporary viaticum. In other words, through the use of images, he depicts the experience of alienation of our time, particularly linked to Chinese society. A very self-alienation, which is the product of an omnipresent “self” in consumerist society and its materialist system. From a social point of view, self-alienation occurs when extremely objectified daily life turns into a form of unreality. This phenomenon is not expressed in Liu Baomin's paintings in the form of social criticism, but in the form of the appearance of subjectivity resulting from lived experience.

He is thus known for his unique portraits – large-scale paintings – where he depicts his subjects in an abstract way. Their faces, their silhouettes, their bodies seem to appear through a veil of water, a curtain of rain. Lines and complex lines with a hyper-realistic rendering fill his works, which occupy him for months. Liu Baomin uses a vivid color palette, where his water-distorted subjects reinforce the complexity of the artist's visual vocabulary.