The Cleveland Museum of Art

Collection Online as of December 14, 2025

Black-and-white photograph close up to the face of a person in an ornate opera costume, head turned and tilted slightly to their left while their eyes shift sideways to look directly out at us. Wisps of dark hair extend from underneath a headdress adorned with fake jewels, white frills, and beaded flowers. Wispy feathers run diagonally from our left through the person's mouth and down towards the lower right corner.

An Actress of Heibei Opera, Huoshentai, Henan Province

2000

Liu Zheng

(Chinese, b. 1969)
China, late 20th century
gelatin silver print
Paper: 45.7 x 45.7 cm (18 x 18 in.); Matted: 71.1 x 66 cm (28 x 26 in.)
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund 2012.106
Courtesy of the artist and Eli Klein Gallery © Liu Zheng
Location: Not on view

Description

Liu Zheng worked for a newspaper in 1991–97, creating images that were supposedly documentary but instead presented a fictional, idealized view of life in China. The burgeoning individual prosperity and increasing openness to the West, meanwhile, was contributing to the rise of the photographer-artist in China, whose work fulfilled personal expressive needs rather than governmental ends. In 1994, Liu took on this new role as he began The Chinese, a seven-year independent project chronicling Chinese society that may have been inspired by German photographer August Sander’s comprehensive catalogue of his country’s people. Like American portraitist Diane Arbus, Liu emphasized dispossessed and marginalized citizens, the type of subjects he had been forbidden to shoot as a photojournalist.
  • Artist; Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg; Cleveland Museum of Art
  • Refocusing Photography: China at the Millenium. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (June 8-November 16, 2025).
    Facing the Ancestors: Chinese Portraits and Figure Painting – Chinese Gallery Rotation 240a, 241c. The Cleveland Museum of Art (organizer) (August 12, 2019-February 2, 2020).
  • {{cite web|title=An Actress of Heibei Opera, Huoshentai, Henan Province|url=false|author=Liu Zheng|year=2000|access-date=14 December 2025|publisher=Cleveland Museum of Art}}

Source URL:

https://www.clevelandart.org/art/2012.106