Li Jin

Li Jin was born in 1958 in Tianjin, China, and graduated from the Chinese Painting Department of the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts in 1983. Some sources report earlier training in dyeing and weaving at a Tianjin arts-and-crafts academy, but this detail is not independently confirmed here. He went on to teach in the Chinese Painting Department at Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, serving as Associate Professor until 2018, and continues to live and work in Tianjin.

Li Jin's paintings are built from ink and color on paper and take everyday sensory pleasure, banquets, food, wine, and the human body, as their recurring subject, rendered with loose, confident brushwork and frequent humor. Sources describe him as one of the artists associated with China's 1980s new-wave painting generation, though his mature reputation rests on the decades of figural, food-centered ink work that followed. His exhibition history spans Chinese institutions such as the Today Art Museum in Beijing and the Long Museum in Shanghai, as well as international galleries and fairs in Hong Kong, Los Angeles, New York, Singapore, and Sydney. As of mid-2026, gallery, museum, and fair sources continue to describe him in the present tense as an active, living artist with exhibitions scheduled into 2026, and no obituary or death notice appears in any of the major art-press or institutional sources reviewed for this profile.

Li Jin is consistently framed by galleries and museums as a central figure in contemporary Chinese ink painting, prized for combining classical brush technique with unguarded, often comic subject matter. Institutional texts, including those from the Long Museum, the Today Art Museum, and INKstudio, repeatedly frame his paintings as exuberant surfaces of food, flesh, and pleasure that carry an undertone of mortality and melancholy beneath their comic energy. Debate over his work tends to focus less on his technical skill than on how directly to read its social and bodily candor.

Li Jin's market runs primarily through the Asian and international auction circuit for contemporary Chinese ink painting, with works on paper appearing at houses including Christie's, Sotheby's, and Phillips. Public aggregate data from MutualArt cites realized prices of up to USD 770,318 for his works on paper and up to USD 323,669 for paintings, but this figure is a category-level aggregate rather than a documented single lot; the specific work, auction house, location, and sale date behind that number are not published in the sources available and should not be treated as a confirmed, citable auction record. His works appear regularly at auction (Artprice records several hundred public lots), which points to a liquid but modestly priced market relative to headline contemporary painting.

Li Jin has a steady record of institutional exhibitions, including the Today Art Museum in Beijing and the Long Museum in Shanghai, and a continuing schedule of solo and group shows running through 2026, though specific museum-collection holdings were not independently confirmed in the sources reviewed for this profile. No catalogue raisonne has been identified, so provenance and documented exhibition history carry extra weight when evaluating a specific work. Collectors should also treat any single published "record price" for this artist with caution: the highest widely cited figure is a category aggregate, not a verified individual sale, and more granular lot-level research through a paid auction database is advisable before relying on it.