Liu Bin (b. 1979, Heilongjiang, China) was raised in a military base in the outskirts of Northern China and grew up watching his father’s military colleagues paint socialist realist posters. After moving to Beijing in 1998, Liu came of age and completed university concurrent to a dramatic decade of explosive economic growth. He graduated from the Visual Communications & Design Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Beijing in 2002 and has since worked as a graphic designer while simultaneously pursuing the path of an independent artist.

In 2012, Liu co-founded the artist collective KETCHUP with two other artists and faculties in CAFA. Inspired by the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Kosuth and Stefan Sagmeister, the group produced irreverent and absurdly humorous works across multiple media. Their first solo exhibition at the Sky Moga Museum in Beijing in 2012 showed parodic paintings that conflated the motifs of iconic blue-chip artists Gerhard Richter, Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons, amongst others, delivering a farcical commentary on interpretations of value and meaning. In 2013, KETCHUP’s second solo exhibition at the Today Art Galleria, predecessor of the Today Art Museum in Beijing, presented cheeky, playful works of conceptual photography, sculpture and installation surrounding the theme of gender identity.

For his individual practice, Liu has always remained loyal to oil painting. The absurdist, nihilistic strand of his philosophy manifests in strange, resplendently hued universes situated anywhere between sublimity or abjection. Delving into the subterraneous archives of history and humanity, Liu tackles the contradictions of human nature, creating canvases charged with the simultaneous terror and beauty of human potential.