Liu Xia (born 1 April 1961 in Beijing) is a Chinese artist who worked in poetry, painting and photography. Although her name is often linked to that of her husband, the activist Liu Xiaobo, her artistic work deserves attention in its own right. Her black-and-white photographs are strongly shaped by Chinese calligraphy, the starting point of the visual arts in the country, and they have also been used as a means of defending freedom of expression.
Before devoting herself fully to art, she worked as a civil servant in a Beijing tax office. She met Liu Xiaobo in the 1980s, within the city's literary scene, and they married while he was held in a labour re-education camp in 1996. During those years she often relayed her husband's messages and spoke publicly on human rights, although sources describe her as preferring a quiet, intellectual life. After her husband received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, she was placed under house arrest, a situation the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention declared arbitrary in 2011.
Her husband died in 2017 while serving an eleven-year sentence for helping to draft Charter 08, despite her requests that he stay out of it. Afterwards, her whereabouts were uncertain for months, and reports said she was suffering from clinical depression. In July 2018 she left China for Germany to receive medical treatment. Her creative career has been overshadowed by political pressure, and her legacy is tied above all to the campaign for her freedom rather than to a large, well-known body of painting.