Whether life-sized or small-scale, Xiaodong's paintings document the people of the Shaanbei region with both realism and pathos Chinese artist Liu Xiaodong's (born 1963) most personally significant project to date, Shaanbei is his series on the eponymous Chinese province and birthplace of the People's Republic of China, which Xiaodong frequented as an art student and which he revisited to paint in 2018.