Liu Xiaodong, Girl in Front of Wardrobe, 2011

Anyone else trying and failing to sort out their wardrobe? This intrepid closet clearer was captured on canvas by Liu Xiaodong, the ultimate “painter of modern life, whose large-scale works serve as a kind of history painting for the emerging world” (in the words of Lisson gallery). Following the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in his native China, Liu proclaimed that he would like to use his medium “to see people as they really are”, spawning his important contribution to the Chinese Neo-Realist movement. Over the decades his style has evolved, but his dedication to the honest depiction of human behaviour remains very much the same.