Liu’s work has consistently explored the body. The artist paints figures into their environments in a symbolic gesture of erasure by government or society. When China transformed in 1998–2000 from a state-planned to a market-based economy, 21 million factory workers lost their jobs. Here, a group of workers from a closed factory is barely visible against the deteriorated wall of the place where they once spent their lives. Liu worked with assistants to paint the workers so skillfully into their surroundings that they seem to disappear. Above them is a banner, left over from the Cultural Revolution, that reads: “The core force leading our cause forward is the Chinese Communist Party.” Liu’s image communicates his feelings of ostracism and his pessimistic view of life in China.