Educational Media Reviews Online

This is a documentary about a Chinese contemporary oil painter, Liu Xiaodong, and his drawings of human bodies of the Three Gorges Project workers and sex workers in Bangkok, Thailand. Companion to the director Jia Zhang-ke’s Golden Lion winner Still Life, the film documents how the painter uses human bodies to express the dignity of his subjects and to reveal his understanding of being an artist.

The film starts on the banks of the Yangtze River of Fengjie, a historical city which was going to disappear due to the construction of the biggest hydroelectric project in China. The audience sees the working environment of a group of shirtless male laborers. These young and middle aged men looked relaxed and worry free when they were playing cards, but life is always cruelly unpredictable when some of them lose their lives in various accidents with no or little compensation. In the second part of the film, Liu visited a group of young sex workers in a brothel in Bangkok. Under the attention of the painter as well as cameras, models appeared curious but uneasy. Surprisingly, the film didn’t choose to illustrate the bitter side of these young women’s lives, instead, it highlighted the humanity of the subjects, showing their daily activities such as following one of the sex workers taking the bus across the city.

Liu is famous for the realistic style in his painting The Three Gorges Project. He is committed to focusing on grassroots activists and the lives that have been impacted by the rapid economic reform in mainland China. As Liu states in the film, he is looking for innovative and creative methods to express his voice, even though there is no concrete incentive for an artist to complete a piece of work.

Jia and Liu share common interests and both have been gaining global attention. The film applies Jia’s cinematography as expected with a slow and detail-focused pace. The film includes Mandarin and Sichuan dialects as well as Thai but comes with English subtitles. It’s highly recommended to a wide range of viewers and it may motivate the audience to explore more about the director, the painter and the bitter and sweet economic transition in present day China and beyond.