Li Qing was born in Huzhou, Zhejiang Province in 1981. Li Qing’s paintings, installations and video works seek rational rifts in similarity and contradiction, acting on the perception and acknowledgment of a viewer through circuitous and overlapped structures. His persistent painting practice no longer focuses on working within the four corners of the picture, but instead constantly expands painting’s external space and ways of seeing. The uninterrupted experimentation and sustained momentum across these various series are outgrowths of the themes Li Qing has been following since 2005: information and image in the technological age, the social mechanisms and power dynamics of seeing, the relationship between people, architecture and the city amidst globalization, the patterns and disciplining of aesthetics in the consumer age, constructing conflict structures and new forms of expression. The capture of micro-politics in everyday spaces and images, the analysis of ideology in aesthetic tradition, make him reflect a special historical consciousness.

Li Qing has had solo shows at Long Museum, Shanghai; Fondazione Prada’s Rongzhai, Shanghai; Song Art Museum, Beijing; Pingshan Art Museum, Shenzhen; Zhejiang Art Museum; Tomás y Valiente Art Centre (CEART), Madrid; Arario Museum, Seoul; The Orient Foundation, Macao; Goethe Institute, Shanghai; Almine Rech; Galerie Eigen+Art; Tang Contemporary Art; among others. A number of prestigious art institutes have also included his works for group shows, such as Shanghai Biennale; Gwangju Biennale; Curitiba Biennale; Prague Biennale; Guangzhou Triennial; Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\ Architecture (UABB); Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art; Venice Biennale Special Invitation Exhibition; Lille3000; Noor Riyadh Light Art Festival; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Asian Art Museum of San Francisco; Institut Valencia d’Art Modern (IVAM); Museum of Contemporary Art, São Paulo (MAC USP); Seoul Museum of Art; Gwangju Museum of Art; Oscar Niemeyer Museum, Curitiba; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chile; Maillol Museum, Paris; Saatchi Gallery, London; National Gallery of Indonesia; Power Station of Art, Shanghai; Shanghai Art Museum; etc.

Li Qing’s works are also widely collected by major institutions and foundations globally, such as Fondazione Prada; Deutsche Bank; Institut Valencia d’Art Modern (IVAM); Rubell Museum, Miami; Art at Swiss Re; Arario Museum, Seoul/Jeju; White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney; Kistefos Museum, Oslo; Kunsthalle HGN, Germany; Initial Access, UK; Bredin Prat Foundation, Paris; Fukutake Foundation, Japan; DSL Foundation, Paris; Fondazione Imago Mundi, Italy; Logan Foundation, San Francisco; Australia China Art Foundation; Art & Culture Foundation(IAC) of Spain; Long Museum, Shanghai; Yuz Museum, Shanghai; Guangdong Museum of Art; Zhejiang Art Museum; TANK Shanghai; Start Museum, Shanghai; K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; Octone Foundation, Hong Kong; Fosun Foundation, Shanghai; CC Foundation, Shanghai; Longlati Foundation, Shanghai; ASE Foundation, Shanghai; The Cloud Collection, Nanjing; Yi Art Museum, Hangzhou; Iris Art Museum, Suzhou; Yue Art Museum, Yantai; Lin Fengmian Art Foundation; Live Forever Foundation, Taichung; Mountain Art Culture & Education Foundation, Taipei; etc.

Li Qing was awarded the “Annual Youth Power” by in 2025. In 2023, he was selected for Influential: Forbes China 30 Contemporary Young Artists. In 2017, He was shortlisted for the Jean-François Prat Prize, becoming the first Asian artist to be shortlisted for the prize. In 2013, he was awarded as “Best of the Best”: Artist of the Year.

Can you tell us about your background and how you started your artistic journey?

I was born in Huzhou, Zhejiang, China — a city that has been a distinguished hub of culture and the arts since ancient times. It is not only one of the birthplaces of porcelain, but also a celebrated cradle of calligraphy and ink painting. Even in this small city, back in the last century when I was a child, there was already fertile ground for artistic learning. My parents are art-loving professionals in the cultural and educational sector. They nurtured my interest in painting as a hobby from an early age: I started by copying the works of Qi Baishi, before progressing to foundational training in Western painting.

This hobby later evolved into the career I wished to pursue. I was admitted to the Affiliated High School of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, and subsequently enrolled in the Academy’s Oil Painting Department. My formative years coincided with China’s reform and opening-up process. I personally witnessed the dramatic transformations of urbanization, globalization and the sweeping shifts of the times, all of which have exerted a profound influence on my later artistic practice.

Who or what are your biggest influences, both artistically and personally?

What has influenced me most, perhaps, is how people with free spirits and profound wisdom perceive the world — their worldview, their sense of time and space, and their understanding of human existence. The formal schooling my generation of Chinese people received growing up was rather insular and monolithic in these regards. Yet in the poetry and prose of ancient Chinese literati I studied from childhood, in Chinese spiritual traditions like Buddhism, and in the diverse, vivid and wise people I have encountered around me, I discovered a far richer worldview and a liberated state of mind.

This expansive sense of freedom is what has shaped me above all else: to refuse to be bound by any single goal, theory, system or self-imposed framework, to break through insularity and uniformity, and to strive to keep one’s spirit from being trapped by the constraints of mundane life.

Your work often engages with images within the technological age—how do you approach the shifting nature of images today, and their influence on perception?

As Baudrillard put it, the image has long since become reality itself, and we have now fully entered an era of image excess. Digitization enables images to be infinitely reproduced, arbitrarily altered and rapidly circulated; AI-generated imagery has further made image production exceedingly accessible. The vast majority of visual information we encounter today has detached itself from the original real — it is processed, filtered, and even outright fabricated.

People increasingly rely on images to perceive the world, rather than experiencing reality firsthand. Yet the authenticity of images grows ever more ambiguous. Smartphone screens, computer interfaces, and fragmented content on social media all serve as the media through which contemporary people view the world. This very mode of viewing is inherently unreliable. The “reality” we perceive is often an illusion reconstructed by algorithms, which is thoroughly reshaping human cognition, memory and standards of judgment — including our perception of the self. On social media, the self becomes an object gazed upon by countless others, and the reification and alienation of the self are ubiquitous.

For this reason, contemporary art is ultimately meaningless if it merely produces refined, polished images. What art ought to do is to reveal and reflect upon the state of alienation behind images, to intervene in the act of viewing itself and create a critical distance, so that viewers may reset their cognition and perception through the fissures within images.

The relationship between people, architecture, and the city recurs in your work. How do urban environments inform your visual language?

My personal growth has coincided with a full cycle of China’s urbanization. The defining characteristics of the urban environment throughout this process are impermanence, replicability, and relentless transformation and erasure. People’s memories of time and space are molded by this very condition: a proliferation of homogeneous buildings, rapidly demolished old spaces, and mass-constructed new cities are inherently imbued with qualities of replication, hybridity, intermixture and uncertainty. Meanwhile, architecture functions as a text of ideology and power, as well as a site of contestation between capital and history.

This lived reality aligns precisely with the logic of the image that I explore in my artistic practice. I observe the dislocations of urban space, the replication of architectural forms, and the rupture between old and new environments — these perceptions have directly crystallized into my visual methodology. The interpenetration, displacement, repetition, nesting and layering of different interfaces constitute the visual structure and language of my work. The “frame” and the “framed” in my practice also serve as a metaphor for individual identity amid the process of urbanization.

What challenges have you faced as an artist, and how have you overcome them?

How to define the internal and external realms of art is a challenge every artist must confront — more specifically, how to delineate and navigate the internal and external dimensions of their own artistic inquiries. Once a work is made public, it is exposed to a wide range of external discourses. Praise and affirmation, doubt and criticism alike all shape an artist’s future choices and judgments. At such moments, one must discern which discourses cut to the core of the artistic inquiry, and which are utterly groundless.

The way to navigate this is to maintain a clear grasp of the core concerns at the heart of one’s creative practice. Only with this clarity can one decide what to pursue and what to set aside, rather than constantly reacting to external feedback. What matters above all is to preserve the purity of one’s overarching artistic inquiry and continue to delve deeper into it.

In what ways do you think the art world has changed since you started your career?

The art world encompasses an extremely broad spectrum. Broadly speaking, its boundaries have grown even more blurred today. On one hand, the rigorous academic circle of art has become increasingly intertwined with other disciplines. Twenty years ago, the dominant concerns in the Western art world were post-Cold War issues, post-colonialism and geopolitics, whereas the Chinese context was shaped by the post-Cultural Revolution era, globalization and urbanization. Today, discussions around identity politics and the post-human era have moved to the forefront, while debates on the ecology of the Anthropocene, cosmotechnics and AI permeate exhibitions of all kinds.

On the other hand, with the rise of self-media, the art landscape at the popular level has become increasingly entertainment-oriented and traffic-driven. In China in particular, there is no social media platform like Instagram widely adopted by art professionals and artists, and domestic social apps generally operate purely on a traffic-driven logic. This has resulted in a chaotic online discourse on art, making it even harder to cultivate high-quality art scenes and exerting a tangible impact on artists’ creative practice. Artworks marked by incisive social reflection, individual expression, and a pure, speculative creative core — the kind that defined earlier practices — have grown increasingly scarce.

Text and photo courtesy of Li Qing Studio

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