UCCA Edge presents its first solo exhibition, Liu Xiaodong: Your Friends from August 8, 2021 to October 10, 2021. Liu Xiaodong (b. 1963, Jincheng, Liaoning province) is the contemporary heir to modern China’s realist painting tradition. Emerging in the 1990s, he began to depict what one critic called “minute but fragmentary observations of life” with snapshot clarity, turning the previously heroic tools of oil painting onto characters and subjectivities at all levels of a rapidly urbanizing and developing society. This exploration unfolded in parallel to a new documentary aesthetic in the works of “Sixth Generation” filmmakers such as Wang Xiaoshuai and Zhang Yuan, with whom he has frequently collaborated. Since the early 2000s, Liu has often worked through plein air sessions staged in globally significant, even fraught, locations, from the Three Gorges Dam (2003) to the U.S.-Mexico border (2020). For his 2010 exhibition “Hometown Boy” at UCCA Beijing, the artist trained his lens on his childhood friends from the paper mill town of Jincheng, in an extended meditation on personal transformation and social mobility.