Mao Lizi

Mao Lizi (also indexed in some Western auction databases in reversed name order as Lizi Mao) was born in 1950. Sources place his birthplace variously in Shanxi Province and in Shanghai, and the record has not been fully reconciled, so no single location is asserted here. He began painting in his youth and came of age during the Cultural Revolution. In 1979 and 1980 he took part, under the pseudonym Mao Lizi, in the first and second Stars Art Exhibitions in Beijing, the unofficial, grassroots shows now treated as a foundational moment in Chinese contemporary art. He received a youth art prize in China in 1981.

He studied in the Oil Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, completing his studies there in 1987; sources differ on whether this concluded in a bachelor's or a master's degree. He later spent time abroad, based in New York in the late 1980s and in Paris through the 1990s, where he was appointed a visiting professor at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts. He returned to China around 2000 and has continued to live and work from a studio in Beijing. Over this period his practice shifted from the photorealist paintings of his early career toward the abstract, biomorphic compositions, including his recurring Ambiguous Flower series, for which he is now most widely known. As of mid-2026, all available sources describe him in the present tense, with no obituary, memorial notice, or death date located in major art press, gallery statements, or reference sources.

Mao Lizi's standing rests principally on his documented role as a founder of the Stars Art Group, the group most consistently credited by art historians as the starting point of unofficial Chinese contemporary art. His work has subsequently appeared in major institutional contexts, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's 1998 exhibition China: 5000 Years and a collateral exhibition of Chinese art at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, alongside solo presentations at Chinese and Hong Kong institutions such as Today Art Museum, Asia Art Center, and Pekin Fine Arts. No verbatim, attributable critic quotation from a major outlet could be confirmed for reproduction here; his critical reputation is instead documented primarily through institutional exhibition history and gallery and museum program texts rather than signed reviews.

Mao Lizi's work appears across auction-tracking platforms including Artprice, Artnet, MutualArt, Invaluable, and AskART, which together list dozens of prior lot results for his paintings. The highest documented result identified is Untitled, which sold for HKD 3,880,000 (about USD 500,000) at Christie's Hong Kong on 31 May 2015, a level corroborated by MutualArt's separately reported ceiling of about USD 500,419 for his paintings. Full ranked results from these databases sit behind subscription access, so this figure should be treated as the highest publicly verified result rather than a certified all-time record; collectors encountering a different figure from a specific database should confirm it directly with the auction house.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Mao Lizi, and no certificate-of-authenticity program has been identified; buyers should rely on documented provenance and on the artist's current representing galleries, Galerie A&R Fleury in Paris and Agora Gallery in New York. His auction footprint is real but comparatively thin and inconsistently reported across databases, so any single quoted "record" price should be verified directly with the relevant auction house rather than taken from a summary listing. Buyers should also note that market databases index the same artist under two name orders, Mao Lizi and Lizi Mao, which is a naming convention difference rather than evidence of two separate artists.