Qiu Xiaofei

Qiu Xiaofei was born in 1977 in Harbin, in China's Heilongjiang province. He studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts in oil painting in 1998 according to Wikipedia, and completing a further degree there in 2002, a graduation confirmed by Hauser & Wirth, Xavier Hufkens, and Ocula, though none of these sources specifies the exact level of that later credential. In 2003 he became part of N12, a loosely organized group of CAFA graduates who began exhibiting together and helped shape a new generation's approach to painting, drawing, and installation.

His work is rooted in personal and family memory, often returning to his native Harbin, and moves between oil painting, watercolor, works on paper, sculpture, and installation to build dreamlike, nonlinear compositions. Per Hauser & Wirth's gallery biography, his work has appeared in major international institutional exhibitions including Kunstmuseum Bern, ZKM Karlsruhe, Tate Liverpool, the Havana Biennial, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Tampa Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, He Art Museum, UCCA Edge in Shanghai, M+ in Hong Kong, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris; specific exhibition years for each venue were not detailed in the sources reviewed for this profile.

He was previously represented by Pace Gallery, New York, where his solo exhibitions included Double Pendulum (2016) and Divination (2021). In early 2026, Hauser & Wirth announced that it would represent Qiu Xiaofei in collaboration with the Brussels gallery Xavier Hufkens, with his first exhibition under the new arrangement, The Theater of Wither and Thrive, opening at Hauser & Wirth's New York 22nd Street location in February 2026. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has acquired his painting Belovezhskaya Forest (2019 to 2021), and his work is also held by M+ in Hong Kong, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and Singapore Art Museum, per Hauser & Wirth's gallery biography. He lives and works in Beijing.

Gallery and market writing about Qiu Xiaofei consistently emphasizes his improvisational approach to painting and his interest in memory that resists a clean linear timeline, describing his work as moving between the dreamlike, the psychological, and the personal. His inclusion in the N12 group placed him early within a cohort of CAFA-trained artists who came to define a distinct strand of post-2000 Chinese contemporary painting, and his subsequent institutional history, from Tate Liverpool and the Havana Biennial to the Centre Pompidou, M+, and a 2025 presence at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, has steadily reinforced that reading. No independently bylined critical review with a verbatim, attributable quotation was available in the current research; most published characterizations of his work come from gallery texts and editorial summaries rather than named critics writing in outlets with independent authorship.

Qiu Xiaofei's auction market is active but comparatively small and inconsistently documented across data providers. Artprice records his work coming up for sale at public auction roughly 157 times, mostly paintings, and HENI estimates around USD 8.62 million in cumulative auction sales over the past twenty one years. The most fully documented individual result is Zero Gravity No. 4 (2016), which sold for USD 282,900 at Christie's in November 2023. Market-data aggregator MutualArt separately cites a higher realized price of up to USD 2,939,914 for a painting as the artist's top auction figure, but the underlying lot, sale venue, and date for that result are not disclosed in publicly accessible summaries, so it should be treated as an unverified upper bound rather than a confirmed record.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Qiu Xiaofei, and no certificate-of-authenticity program has been identified; buyers should expect verification to run through his current galleries, Hauser & Wirth and Xavier Hufkens. His auction record is thin relative to his institutional profile, and different market databases currently report meaningfully different "highest price" figures, with the best-documented single result sitting near USD 283,000 and a higher, unverified aggregate figure near USD 2.9 million reported elsewhere without lot-level detail. His recent move to Hauser & Wirth and Xavier Hufkens, together with the Metropolitan Museum's acquisition of his work, are the clearest signals of a rising institutional profile, but collectors should treat any single auction data point with caution given the small number of recorded sales.