Photo Provided to China Daily

"I didn't name them because it would have brought out different explanations," Liu says. "I did think of names, but each one came with a story or gave meaning to the work, and that's not what I wanted.

Liu, dressed in a white shirt and dark V-neck sweater, is wearing a pair of glasses. His head is cleanly shaven, and though Liu is just over 40, he could be any number of years above or below that.

"Art is incredibly simple," he says. "What I want to do is squeeze out that momentary feeling, that feeling you get in the instant you see the work. What you see, what you feel, and that's it."

It's all part of Liu's dialogue with reality: confronting it and revealing the perpetual present and the just past. "I'm not trying to get to a finality-an end result of telling you what the work is. It's a starting point. A place that we can begin to ask questions."

As one of China's rising art stars, Liu's work is increasingly collectable. Since the 2008 Saatchi show, Liu's art has been on display at the Pompidou Centre and Art Basel Unlimited, as well as various solo exhibitions in Beijing, Paris and Seoul.

Last September, at Christie's Shanghai sale-the first mainland sale by a foreign auction house-the aforementioned Purple Air sold for $396,157, four times its auction estimate.