A painting on display at the Voice of the Volga River exhibition at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. [Photo by Jiang Dong/China Daily]

Thanks to a close relationship between China and Russia, Chinese oil painting is heavily influenced by the Soviet realistic style.

In the 1950s, many Chinese artists were sent to the former Soviet Union to study oil painting.

And a class taught by Soviet painter Konstantin Maksimov (1913-94) at Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts (1955-57) produced New China's first generation of oil painters, including Liu.

Chinese audiences are typically drawn to classic Russian paintings.

In 2015, Moscow's State Tretyakov Gallery exhibited works by the 19th-century Peredvizhniki (Russian for "the wanderers") artists' group at the National Museum of China in Beijing, and the show drew large crowds.

The paintings on show included works by Ilya Repin and Isaac Levitan.