He Xiangyu

He Xiangyu was born in 1986 in Kuandian County, in Liaoning Province, China. He graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Shenyang Normal University in 2008, then moved toward a conceptual practice built on sculpture, installation, drawing, and video rather than painting.

His breakthrough project, the Cola Project, begun around 2009 and 2010, involved boiling down more than a hundred tons of Coca-Cola into a tar-like residue, a work read as a meditation on consumption, labor, and the branding of American culture in China. He followed it with the Tank Project, a full-scale replica of a tank sewn from cowhide, a piece sometimes discussed for its indirect reference to Tiananmen Square. These works established him as an artist willing to use industrial-scale, hand-intensive processes to address subjects that are difficult to address directly in China.

He had a solo presentation, New Directions: He Xiangyu, at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing in 2015. He has continued to show internationally, including solo presentations at Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York and White Space in Beijing, most recently The Life of Things at White Space in 2025, and Past Is Prologue at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts, also in 2025. He currently lives and works between Beijing and Berlin.

He Xiangyu's reputation has been built largely through institutional and biennial exposure rather than through a long critical literature in major Western outlets, so no verified verbatim critic quotes from named writers in major publications are available for this profile. The recurring curatorial reading of his work centers on his treatment of ordinary or loaded materials, from mass-produced soda to the leather-clad form of a tank, as vehicles for examining consumption, labor, memory, and the unspoken edges of recent Chinese history. That reading has carried him from an early solo presentation at UCCA in Beijing through recent solo exhibitions at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts and White Space, a trajectory that reflects sustained institutional confidence in the work even as its market recognition lags behind.

Auction data for He Xiangyu remains limited. The highest documented public sale price found in current research is HKD 441,000 (roughly USD 56,900) for an untitled work sold at Phillips in Hong Kong on 3 December 2020. This should be read as the highest price confirmed by available sources rather than a definitively exhaustive all-time record, since auction activity for the artist is sparse and concentrated in a small number of Asia-region sales. His primary market runs through gallery representation, principally Andrew Kreps Gallery and White Space, rather than through a deep secondary market.

He Xiangyu's market is still early stage. There is no catalogue raisonne, and the publicly documented auction record consists of very few transactions, most notably a 2020 Hong Kong sale at Phillips. That thinness cuts both ways: it limits the reliability of any price trend, but it also means his market has not yet been fully tested at scale despite nearly two decades of substantial museum exposure. Collectors should treat any single auction result as a data point rather than a trend, weigh gallery representation and institutional collecting, including the White Rabbit Collection, as the stronger signal of durability, and expect provenance to run primarily through his representing galleries rather than through a formal authentication body.