Kasing Lung

Kasing Lung was born on December 31, 1972, in Hong Kong, and moved to the Netherlands with his family as a child. He completed a Bachelor of Arts covering design, photography, publishing, and sculpture in 1995, most likely at a Dutch art institute, though the specific school is not named in available sources. He later studied and worked in Belgium, where he became a children's book illustrator and, according to multiple profiles, was the first Chinese artist to win Belgium's national Illustration Award, for the book "Mama is Weg." The exact year of that award has not been documented.

Lung began working with the Hong Kong company How2work as an illustrator around 2011, publishing storybooks and collectible figures, and released his first Chinese-language illustrated book, "My Little Planet," in Taiwan in 2013. In 2015 he introduced The Monsters, a family of elf-like creatures drawing on Nordic mythology, from which Labubu and related characters emerged. Around 2019, he entered a licensing partnership with Pop Mart that turned Labubu into a global collectible-toy phenomenon, with a marked surge in international attention in 2024 tied in part to celebrity visibility, including its association with BLACKPINK's Lisa.

Alongside the toy business, Lung has continued to show as a fine artist, with a solo exhibition, "This Is What It Feels Like," at Hidari Zingaro in Tokyo in 2020, followed by further solo shows at Kaikai Kiki Gallery and Hidari Zingaro, both run by Takashi Murakami's studio. In 2024 Hong Kong International Airport hosted what was described as the world's largest Monsters art installation, and Lung mounted "Everybody Knows," a large-scale solo exhibition in a Hong Kong retail and gallery space, at LANDMARK and BELOWGROUND. In early 2026 he was named Artistic Director of ComplexCon Hong Kong. He now divides his time between Belgium and Hong Kong and, as of this profile's date, is alive and professionally active, with no reports of death in any major source.

Lung's reception has centered less on traditional art criticism than on the cultural and commercial trajectory of The Monsters and Labubu, tracked closely by fashion, design, and business press as much as by art critics. Institutional interest has grown alongside the toy's popularity: Asia Society Hong Kong Center mounted "Monsters by Monsters: Now and Then" as part of a ten-year anniversary world tour that also traveled to Shanghai, Taipei, Paris, and Tokyo, and Hong Kong International Airport commissioned a large-scale public installation of the characters in 2024. No verified, exact critical assessment from a named art critic at a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile; coverage to date is largely descriptive of the work's popularity and cross-over between illustration, toy design, and gallery exhibition rather than sustained formal art criticism.

Lung's auction market is very young, with its first significant results only in 2025, split across specialized collectible-toy auctions and traditional fine-art evening sales. The best-documented auction high is a mint green, 131 cm first-edition Labubu sculpture that sold for RMB 1,240,000 (about USD 174,000 with fees) at Yongle International Auction in Beijing on June 10, 2025, a result reported by NBC News, Artnet, and Bamboo Works as a record for Labubu and its creator. In the same sale, a limited-edition brown Labubu sold for RMB 934,000 (about USD 130,000) and a set titled Three Wise Labubu sold for RMB 586,500 (about USD 80,000). In the traditional fine-art context, Christie's Hong Kong sold the painting "Excited Plastic" (2021) for HK$781,200 (about USD 100,000) on March 28, 2025, reported at the time as the auction record for the artist within that painting category. A single later report describes a painting titled "Part 1" (2022) selling for about HKD 1.4 million (roughly USD 179,500) at Christie's Hong Kong on September 27, 2025, which would exceed the Yongle figure, but this result is not independently corroborated in available sources and should be treated with caution. Because the market spans both collectible-toy specialists and mainstream auction houses, results for similar works can vary widely depending on venue and category.

Lung's market lacks the usual scaffolding of an established artist's market: there is no catalogue raisonne, no confirmed exclusive representing gallery, and no documented museum acquisitions into permanent collections, only temporary institutional exhibitions. Auction results to date come from a mix of specialized collectible sales and mainstream evening sales, so a given work's price can depend heavily on which market it is sold into and whether it is a painting, a sculpture, or a licensed collectible figure. Collectors should also expect the record price to keep moving: the current best-documented high was set in mid-2025 at a dedicated Labubu sale, and at least one later, singly sourced report suggests it may already have been exceeded, in a market still only a year or two into meaningful public auction activity.