Born: Xian, Shanxi province, 1977. Lives and works in Beijing.

“It is the details in life that I pay the closest attention to,” Liang Yuanwei says: “… things that others ignore or shun.” Whether quirky installations or meticulous oil paintings, her works are all driven by ideas—about life and transience, romance and solitude. In Salt Series—Little Clocks (2006), tiny watch hands are attached to a woman’s shirt and shoes, a passport, a cigarette pack, and a sachet of desiccant. Just as salt dissolves in water, the artist seems to say, so the things that consume us dissolve in time. For Piece of Life (2008-09), a series of twenty-six oil paintings, she spent up to twelve hours a day recreating with painstaking fidelity the patterns and textures of old fabric scraps: upholstery, curtains, cushions, clothes. A false stroke meant starting a canvas all over again, something she was forced to do more than once. The works seem to reflect on female labour and the beauties of domesticity, but the real point was the process of making them, she says: it was a way to calm her “inner motion” and pull away from the chaos of life. “I have always felt,” she says, “that truly great work should be silent like scenery. One experiences its deep meaning when one’s mind moves with it.” It may be no accident that in Piece of Life, subtle shifts of light and shade make the patterns seem to move.