Liu Zheng is a Chinese photographer born in 1969 in Wuqiang County, Hebei Province, who lives and works in Beijing. He trained as an optical engineer at the Beijing Institute of Technology, graduating in 1991, then worked as a photojournalist for Workers' Daily until 1997; in 1996, with the photographer Rong Rong, he co-founded New Photo, the influential underground magazine that catalysed China's experimental photography scene.

Liu works between documentary and staging, using the camera less to record than to make myth. His landmark seven-year series The Chinese (1994–2002) gathered some 180 portraits into a vast visual archive of a country in the throes of market reform — an unflinching human catalogue often likened to Robert Frank's The Americans — while staged studio series such as Three Realms and Four Beauties restaged Chinese mythology and history as theatres of the sacred and profane. A purist of analogue process, he shoots on a large-format 4 × 5 camera and develops his images by hand as platinum prints, never digitally.

His recent project The Stories of Immortals (Soushenji) — named for the fourth-century compendium of gods and ghosts — photographs the stone-carving workshops of Quyang, Hebei, where deities, Buddhas, Mao Zedong, Marilyn Monroe and Mickey Mouse are mass-produced side by side as commodities, stripped of context and awaiting sale. Shown as his first solo exhibition in Australia at REDBASE Art, Sydney (2024) — following the group exhibition Mind of History and Culture at Redbase Foundation, Indonesia (2015) — it extends his enquiry into faith, history and commodification. Liu exhibited at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003) and won the L'Oréal Grand Jury Prize at the Pingyao International Photography Festival (2002); his work is held in major collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the International Center of Photography, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Sigg Collection, Switzerland; and the Deutsche Bank Collection.