Lu Hao

Lu Hao was born in Beijing in 1969. He trained in the Chinese Ink Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, graduating in 1992, and was already recognized as an accomplished ink painter by the late 1990s before broadening into sculpture, photography, and installation. His work returns repeatedly to the transformation of Beijing: architectural models rendered in Perspex or plexiglas, ink scrolls recording the changing facades of Chang'an Street, and installations that treat the city's demolition and rebuilding as a subject in its own right.

He built an international exhibition record through the 1999 Venice Biennale, the 2001 group show living in time at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, and his inclusion, between 2005 and 2007, in Mahjong, the touring survey of Uli Sigg's collection of Chinese contemporary art shown at Kunstmuseum Bern, Hamburger Kunsthalle, and Museum der Moderne Salzburg. In 2007 he showed ink-on-silk works from his Chang'an Street series at documenta 12 in Kassel, and in 2008 he took part in the 7th Shanghai Biennale. In 2009 he served as curator of the Chinese Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale, held a position as foreign art consultant to the City of Paris through 2013, and was commissioned by Ferrari to design a one-off, jade-inspired livery for a 599 GTB Fiorano. That same year the Singapore Art Museum gave him his first solo museum exhibition in Southeast Asia. He is currently represented by Triumph Gallery in Beijing, where he held a solo exhibition, The Out-of-Joint World, in 2024. He continues to live and work in Beijing.

Institutional writing about Lu Hao consistently frames him as part of the generation of Chinese artists who moved ink painting into conceptual territory, using found and manufactured materials to comment on Beijing's rapid urban change. His inclusion in the Sigg Collection's Mahjong survey placed him inside one of the most influential public accounts of Chinese contemporary art, and his participation in documenta 12 and the Shanghai and Venice biennials reinforced that standing at an institutional level. No signed review or essay by a named critic in a major independent outlet could be verified with exact wording in the available research, so no direct quotation is reproduced here; the critical record instead runs primarily through gallery, collection, and museum exhibition texts rather than independent press criticism.

Lu Hao's public secondary market is thin and, as of this writing, difficult to state with confidence. MutualArt records auction activity for the name Lu Hao, but the dossier available here does not turn up a single, clearly documented lot that can be confirmed as his all-time high with a verified title, price, house, and date. This is complicated by the existence of at least one other, unrelated artist cataloged under the same romanized name: a painter born in 1976 whose 2003 oil painting Wedding sold at Ravenel in Hong Kong in 2010. That result belongs to the other artist, not to Lu Hao (b. 1969), and should not be read as his auction record. Separately, in 2009 Ferrari commissioned Lu Hao to design a one-off, jade-inspired livery for a 599 GTB Fiorano, which was later auctioned in Beijing; one social-media source puts the sale near USD 1.77 million, but this figure is not independently confirmed, and as a collector-car sale rather than an art-market transaction, it is not a substitute for an auction benchmark.

Because more than one artist has exhibited or sold work under the name Lu Hao, including a painter born in 1976 whose work has appeared in Hong Kong auction catalogs, buyers should confirm attribution by birth year, medium, and gallery history before treating any listed sale as evidence of this artist's market. There is no catalogue raisonne, and the strongest available verification path runs through Triumph Gallery in Beijing, his current representative. His institutional pedigree, spanning documenta, the Sigg Collection, and a Venice Biennale curatorship, is well documented and durable, but the public auction record is sparse enough that it should not be treated as a reliable pricing benchmark on its own.