Liu Xiaodong, a student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing up to 1988, has explored a figurative practice as part of the avant-garde. Liu Xiaodong's style, while figurative, is also expressionistic. His subjects are most often friends and colleagues from the Central Academy, as well as figures in the arts community. Liu Xiaodong painted Smoker soon after entering the Central Academy as a teacher. The tension that resulted in the closing of the 'China/Avant-garde' exhibition (February 1989) predated the exhibition and was already being explored by many contemporary artists. Liu Xiodong's adherence to making paintings with subjects that included the disaffected and alienated youth of Beijing belong to the larger group of painters known collectively as the Cynical Realists. Smoker depicts a young Beijing film director sharing a cigarette with an older worker.(1) Painted in close perspective, in the artist's studio, the young director is tainted with the vanity of the new emerging elite.(2) In stark contrast are the slightly grotesque and simple features of the old worker, who is consigned to the background and carries with him the burden of age and conformity. Pushed together and made to share the pictorial space, Smoker portrays a moment when the aspirations of youth, hungry for individuality and consumer power and already corrupted by this potential, juxtaposed with the tired, old proletariat worker, someone without drive. Here, over a cigarette, two figures become metaphoric carriers of a moment which depicts one interpretation of the old China and the new.

Cynical Realism was coined by the critic Li Xianting to describe a vein of artistic practice that was disinterested in being part of the idealism of an earlier period.(3) Cynical realists focused their attention on the mundane, and 'used a roguishly cynical approach to illustrate themselves and their immediate and familiar environment, with its tableaux of boredom, chance and absurdity'.(4) Interested in the minutiae of existence, artists such as Liu Xiodong, whose practice is associated with Cynical Realism, question any sense of a sustainable utopia. Instead, they concentrate on painting a close, unglamorous view of a China that grapples with the inherent tensions that accompanied its immersion into the stream of the global economy.

1. Jose, Nicholas, Letter to Doug Hall, 8 December 1998.

2. Liu Xiaodong, Queensland Art Gallery artist's file, Brisbane.

3. Li Xianting. 'Major trends in the development of contemporary Chinese Art', in China's new art, post-1989. Hanart TZ, Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong 1993, pp.19-22.

4. China's new art, post-1989, p.20.

Liu Xiaodong’s figurative painting practice is characterised by the depiction of unconventional figures affected by the mundane realities of everyday life. A significant proponent of the neo-realist movement that emerged as part of a broad swathe of artistic developments in the early 1990s, Liu disassociated himself from the idealism of earlier periods that sought to create a heroic or distinctively modern Chinese aesthetic. Concerned instead with reflecting the realities faced by individuals as China integrated into a globalised economy, Liu introduced a subtle irreverence in his figurative painting. 

Smoker 1988 depicts a young Beijing film director sharing a cigarette with an older worker. Painted in close perspective, the young director is tainted by the vanity of the emerging elite, in stark contrast with the plain features of the old worker, who is consigned to the background and carries with him the burdens of both age and conformity. Smoker sees the aspirations of youth, hungry for individuality and consumer power, already corrupted by this potential.