Liu Shuyong

b. 1962, Linqu, Shandong

Photographer, exhibition organizer

Liu Shuyong obtained his BA degree in Chinese literature at Nankai University in Tianjin (1993). In the same year he was assigned to teach as an Assistant Professor at the Central Institute of Finance and Banking in Beijing, where he is now Associate Professor. With the help of a friend, he began learning photography in 1988 and by the following year was working on a series of photographs under the title Dwarfs. From 1990 to 1991, with the help of his assistant, Liu finished his project Ruins, a series of pictures that focus on ruins in cities, like Beijing, that are experiencing rapid transformation.

In 1993, he worked on several projects, including The Death of a Beijing Man, What Are the Mainland Chinese Busy With? and Sex in China. In 1994, he started working on his year-long project Ping’anyu, named after his home village, which is about the changes in a small village in northern China. In 2001, he was the organizer of ‘Self’, a group show of younger-generation photographers, including Lu Zhirong (a.k.a.Rong Rong), Mo Yi and Hong Hao.

Focusing on ordinary people—workers, peasants, and teachers—Liu is concerned with extraordinary themes—death, sex, ruins, social crisis—through a representation of non-dramatic, everyday-life-like images. In his Death of a Beijing Man (1993), in which a picture of a young man is seen over an altar-like table in an old dark room, the implication seems obvious: how and why did a young man like this die?

Further reading

Dislocation (1996). Dislocation vol. 7, ‘New Beijing Photography’. Publisher unknown.

QIAN ZHIJIAN