Person

Ding Li was born in 1979 in Shanghai and graduated with a master’s degree from the Oil Painting Department of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris. After graduating in 2008, he returned to China where he started teaching and painting. In 2015, in ‘Not Impulsive Enough Is the Devil’ at MadeIn Gallery, Ding re-assembled earlier works, juxtaposing multiple paintings to become single artworks, breaking the original composition and visual balance, aiming to develop a new visual language. The following year, he expanded his practice to include photography and computer graphics and developed collages that combined painting and installation. In 2017, he returned to oil painting, his most familiar medium, and his focus became the brush-stroke. Ding's work is based on repeated experiments with the expressive possibilities of paint, creating a new and idiosyncratic visual language of form that draws on popular culture as much as upon traditions of portraiture in western art history. Using oil paint, spray paints,various brushes and frames in novel and somewhat tongue-in-cheek ways, Ding Li references the world of urban graffiti, computer graphics, and contemporary design.Ding’s recent exhibitions include: ‘Extreme Mix’, Guangzhou Airport Biennale, Guangzhou, China (2019); ‘The Variable and The Generating’, MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai, China (2019); ‘Young’nergy’, The First Porsche “Young Chinese Artist of the Year” Nominees’ Exhibition, Modern Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2017); ‘Serendipitous Mission’, MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai, China (2017); ‘Form Consumption Over Substance Reflection’, MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai, China (2017); ‘Information Sculpture Superhighway’, MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai, China (2016) and ‘Bentu, Chinese artists at a time of turbulence and transformation’, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France (2016). Ding Li lives and works in Shanghai.