Chinese artist's timely response to migrant crisis in Europe

Among the most striking works in the collection is a huge painting of a classic Tuscan landscape seen from the edge of a swimming pool tastefully cut into the hillside.

In the foreground, two hunting dogs look on languidly, perhaps a little curious but not that interested, as a partly deflated piece of a black rubber dinghy bobs incongruously in the water, like the last remnant of a migrant boat sinking.

"For people in so many parts of the world, Europe is like a promised land," Liu explains.

"Even though migration has been an integral part of the history of humanity, this huge wave, this influx of refugees has definitely caused some problems for European society.

"And this image of the deflating dinghy was a way of injecting the problems and the unresolved questions that migration brings into a paradisical, idyllic setting."

Liu says his visits to Prato had left him surprised by the slow pace of its Chinese community's integration into Italian life.

"They have been there mostly for at least a couple of generations and still they are very closed off. They have their own customs and traditions and are still very separate from the local population."

The Palazzo Strozzi's director general Arturo Galansino says Liu's work was a long overdue attempt by the art world to make sense of the profound changes brought about by migration without seeking to take sides in the day-to-day political battles over whether Europe should close its frontiers or open its gates.

"The exhibition shows how the artist's eye moved from the local to the international," Galansino says.