Qin Qi

Qin Qi was born in 1975 in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, China. He studied oil painting at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang, earning an undergraduate degree in 1999 and a graduate degree in the Department of Oil Painting in 2002, and he now teaches at the same institution. He lives and works between Shenyang and Beijing.

His paintings are built from surreal, exaggerated color and a recurring interest in taking ordinary objects, furniture, landscapes, and figures and setting them into unfamiliar or imagined contexts. Critics and curators have located this practice within the broader conversation around new Chinese painting that emerged in the 2000s.

His profile rose through a series of institutional exhibitions with Tang Contemporary Art and other venues. His first major museum solo, A Chair Can Also Save Lives, opened at the Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai in 2010 and is cited by multiple sources as the exhibition that established him as a significant figure in contemporary Chinese painting. He followed with a solo show at Platform China in Beijing in 2014, a solo exhibition at Tang Contemporary Art in Beijing in 2017, and Fragrance of the Night, a solo exhibition curated by Cui Cancan at Tang Contemporary Art's Hong Kong space in 2019. He also took part in the 2020 group exhibition echo among Geographies at Tang Contemporary Art in Hong Kong. Most recently, Tang Contemporary Art presented his solo show Figures Series in Beijing in 2022.

Critical attention to Qin Qi has centered on his 2010 solo exhibition at the Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai, which framed him as a key figure in the new Chinese painting conversation, and on his steady visibility through Tang Contemporary Art from 2017 onward. Writers have also emphasized his surreal treatment of ordinary objects and landscapes as a way of unsettling academic painting conventions, a reading consistent across gallery, museum, and independent art-criticism sources.

Qin Qi is represented by Tang Contemporary Art, which has shown his work in Beijing, Hong Kong, and, through its broader program, Seoul. His work is held in the White Rabbit Collection in Sydney, a major public collection focused on contemporary Chinese art. Public auction-market data for Qin Qi is otherwise limited. A single secondary compilation reports a price of RMB 3,910,000 (about USD 546,221) for Alibaba No. 1 at China Guardian, Beijing, on 13 June 2023, but this figure could not be corroborated by a primary auction-house record or a second independent source, so it is treated here as unverified rather than a confirmed record. Separately, Sotheby's Hong Kong listed the 2002 painting Backyard Fire in a 2026 Contemporary Day Auction with a pre-sale estimate of HKD 250,000 to 350,000; the realized price was not available in the sources reviewed. No verified all-time auction record can currently be established for the artist.

Qin Qi's institutional standing, a teaching post at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts, representation by Tang Contemporary Art, and a place in the White Rabbit Collection, is well documented. His public auction record is not. No catalogue raisonne exists, and the limited, single-sourced auction data available means collectors should treat any reported sale price with caution and rely primarily on gallery and exhibition provenance when evaluating a work.