Butterfly 8 - - Liu Xiaofeng, 2007

Liu Xiaofeng

Liu Xiaofeng is a contemporary painter from Hubei Province, China (1976). She is known for her black and white series *Body and Butterfly.

Photorealistic paintings

Liu Xiaofeng chooses subjects for her paintings that evoke luxury and erotic. Her staged still lives of the series Body show female beauty and allurement. Her series Butterfly seems to be a metaphor of the series Body. The images of butterflies are painted in an enlarged scale. In this way there remains a distance between the painted world and the world of the viewer. By using a color palette that only includes white, grey and black Liu Xiaofeng highlights the stylised character of her work. The predominant dark tones of her series Butterfly create a night atmosphere and emphasize the white patterns of the butterfly wings.

Her oeuvre represents a self-confident young Chinese generation. Liu Xiaofeng makes a link to the Chinese erotic paintings of the 18th century but translates them to contemporary society.

Butterfly 8

A dark butterfly with white spots on the spread wings sits on a ground with many small blossoms. The bird’s eye view of the butterfly focuses on the left wing of the insect. The soft light emphasizes the white spots of the wing’s borders and some bigger spots in the middle of the wings as if they would glow themselves.