Liu Gang 刘刚

Liu Gang is a Beijing-based artist known for his material-driven practice that expands the boundaries of painting and sculpture. Born in Anhui Province in 1965, he graduated from the Oil Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in 1991 and later completed CAFA’s master's and advanced research program in 1995. This rigorous academic background laid the foundation for his lifelong exploration of materiality as both artistic language and cultural metaphor.
Since the early stages of his practice, Liu has experimented with diverse materials beyond traditional oil on canvas, developing a unique vocabulary centered on texture, weight, structure and the inherent social connotations of matter itself. By cutting, welding, juxtaposing and layering materials across two-dimensional and three-dimensional space, he constructs works that blur the line between painting and object, surface and structure.
In rejecting the constraints of conventional pictorial logic, Liu creates new “surfaces” through linen, wood, metal and other raw, unembellished substances. His approach is open, critical and conceptually driven—embracing primitive materials not for nostalgia but for their ability to articulate a direct, unmediated visual language. Through these transformations, Liu Gang offers a powerful rethinking of contemporary painting as a site where material, form and idea continuously redefine one another.

Submitted by Migrant Bird Space