Liu Baojun

Liu Baojun is a modern Chinese painter whose work encountered in the Shanghai ‘SOHO’ of New York lore, the Moganshan District. The Moganshan District is set off from droll tiers of concrete apartment skyscrapers by the low scroll of a 6 foot graffiti wall. The District itself is a maze of warehouse galleries, nooked with tiny workspaces for the artists who display there.

Liu Baojun’s work was a clear standout from the din, both in subject matter and technique. While technical excellence in China is itself not unusual, nonconformity in subject matter and technical excellence was, most certainly.

Interestingly, the women that he paints are not of the diminutive, ladylike portraiture traditional in China. Rather, the women appear in Western, Eastern and no dress and are in various positions of repose, smoking (a taboo for women in China). This art is playful, beautiful and provocative in a thoughtful way. It has content that doesn’t dead end in rumination.
From the inside of (the)painting to the outside of (the) painting, there is nothing, no passage.

http://www.arcticoak.net/posts/skill-and-whimsy-in-modern-china/
http://www.galeriedumonde.com/artist/canvas/LiuBaojun/page1/