1. Liu Xiaodong (Eslite Gallery, Taipei)
One of the giants of Chinese contemporary art, Liu Xiaodong is renowned for his large-scale, neo-realist oil paintings of modern life in China (one example pictured above). Liu began receiving international attention in the early 2000s, when he produced a series of paintings depicting families who had been displaced by the construction of the enormous Three Gorges Dam. Since then, Liu has painted everything from communities reeling from the effects of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake to miners digging for jade in China’s northwest province of Xinjiang.