In 1985, when he was a student, Liu Xiaodong went to Jiajiagou, Northern Shaanxi, China, to sketch the rural landscape. Yan’an, as the holy land of revolution and Chinese local oil painting, had a great influence on him. From 2018 to 2021, Liu returned to the starting point of his art practice and re-examined the constantly changing urban and rural landscape of the territory.

The Roar depicts a group of elderly people from northern Shaanxi sitting together, with one of them singing and waving his arms. The only young man in the painting was created using the artist’s assistant as a model. The cave dwellings that have been passed down for generations, simple clothing, blue-and-yellow plastic round chairs, and dried flower-patterned beds are all real and ordinary scenes in the rural areas of northern Shaanxi.