About Yu Xiaodong "When I was five years old," painter Yu Xiaodong recalls, "I wanted to be an artist." That single-minded passion to create art never deserted Yu, who has made an important mark on the contemporary Chinese art world with his well-known series of Tibetan portraiture. The artist's profound respect for the Tibetan people, their complex beliefs and culture, as well as Tibet's extraordinary landscape, radiates from his meticulously detailed oil paintings of the colorfully nomadic people with whom he lived and worked from 1984 to 1997.

Yu Xiaodong was born in 1963 in Shenyang in the northeastern province of Liaoning, China, considered to be the gateway to the Korean peninsula. It was th...