Hao Liang

Hao Liang was born in 1983 in Chengdu, Sichuan province, China. He enrolled at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing in 2002, majoring in Chinese painting within the school's Chinese Painting Department, and completed a bachelor's degree there in 2006 followed by a master's degree in 2009. In 2009 he became the first recipient of the school's Luo Zhongli Scholarship in the Chinese painting category, an early sign of institutional recognition for his approach to the medium.

His practice applies traditional materials and formats, ink and mineral pigment on silk, hand scrolls, and album leaves, to imagery that ranges from classical literary references to contemporary and psychologically charged subject matter. The multi-panel silk landscapes he showed as Eight Views of Xiaoxiang (2014 to 2016) at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing in 2016 helped establish him, alongside a solo exhibition the same year at the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht, as a painter capable of carrying old formats into new critical territory.

His profile broadened internationally with inclusion in the central exhibition of the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, and with Portraits and Wonders, his first solo exhibition in the United States, at Gagosian in New York in 2018. He has continued to show internationally, including Autumn Thoughts at Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou (2021), The Sad Zither at Gagosian's Grosvenor Hill space in London (2023), and inclusion in the 15th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (2025 to 2026). He lives and works in Beijing.

Critical writing on Hao Liang tends to center on the tension between his technical fidelity to historical Chinese ink painting and the contemporary, sometimes unsettling content he places inside it. Writing in Artnet News in 2018, Philip Tinari, then director of UCCA, argued that Western critics too easily file the work under a settled tradition of Chinese ink painting, when in fact a whole community of conservative Chinese ink painters regards it as heretical. That framing, an artist read very differently by Western critics and by ink-painting traditionalists in China, has largely held. His inclusion in the 2017 Venice Biennale and subsequent acquisitions by museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Centre Pompidou are generally read as confirmation that this hybrid position, rather than being a compromise, is itself the point of the work.

Hao Liang's market sits well behind his museum profile in terms of public documentation. Aggregated auction-database figures point to realized prices for his paintings reaching into the low seven figures in US dollars, but the specific work, auction house, sale location, and date behind that top figure could not be confirmed against a primary auction-house record as of this profile's data date. Christie's and Phillips both maintain active artist pages for his lots, but a confirmed hammer price for any single lot could not be verified here. Collectors should treat any headline "record price" figure for this artist as provisional until it can be traced to a specific, dated sale.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Hao Liang, and verification of a given work should run through his primary dealers, Gagosian and Gladstone Gallery, rather than through a market database alone. Buyers researching his auction history should also be careful with naming: the artist appears in Western-format databases both as "Hao Liang" and, name order reversed, as "Liang Hao." At least two other artists carry close variants of that name: a painter born in 1988 in Guangdong who is represented by 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, and a sculptor born in 1960 in Beijing who has shown at UCCA, the same institution that hosted this artist's 2016 solo. Neither should be confused with Hao Liang, born 1983 in Chengdu. Given the current gap between his strong institutional record and the thin, imprecisely sourced public auction data, collectors should anchor any valuation work in primary-source exhibition and collection history rather than in aggregated price figures alone.