Ye Linghan

Ye Linghan was born in 1985 in Lishui, Zhejiang, China. He has said he began making contemporary work as a university freshman in 2005, and he graduated from the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou in 2009, where he studied traditional mural painting and drawing. His practice since has been multidisciplinary, combining painting, hand-drawn and 3D animation, video, and installation, often built around invented digital personas and folkloric or mythological imagery rendered in a deliberately sketch-like, screen-native style.

His early institutional exposure came through group exhibitions including Reshaping History at Today Art Museum, Beijing (2010) and Plus Follow at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai (2011), followed by inclusion in the 2013 Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Australia. He received the Luo Zhongli Prize in 2010. Through the 2010s he held solo exhibitions with a series of galleries, including Ben Brown Fine Arts in Hong Kong, Vanguard Gallery and Boers-Li Gallery in China, and HdM Gallery in London, and continued a long-running project built around the character Lucy across several exhibitions from 2018 to 2021.

He is currently associated with SPURS Gallery in Beijing, which lists him on its artist roster and gave him the solo exhibition "Yi, Alone or Together" (2025 to 2026). In 2024 he had a solo presentation at the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art in Kobe, Japan. Sources differ on his primary base: HdM Gallery's biography and Ocula describe him as based in Beijing, while SPURS Gallery and Artsy describe him as living and working in Shanghai; all agree he remains based in mainland China and actively exhibiting through 2025 and 2026, with no report of death, illness, or retirement.

Ye Linghan's critical profile has been built primarily through institutional and gallery exhibition rather than a substantial body of signed press criticism. His inclusion in Today Art Museum's Reshaping History (2010) and the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2013) placed him early within major survey exhibitions, and a 2013 feature in the South China Morning Post treated him as a rising Beijing-based artist working outside overt political subject matter. His long-running Lucy project, staged across Vanguard Gallery, Boers-Li Gallery, HdM Gallery, and SPURS Gallery from 2018 to 2021, and his 2025 to 2026 exhibition "Yi, Alone or Together" at SPURS Gallery, covered by Mousse Magazine, have kept him visible in international art press as a painter engaging internet-native imagery and Chinese mythological and mural traditions side by side. No verbatim, attributable review quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile.

Public auction data for Ye Linghan is limited and imprecise. MutualArt's aggregated auction database lists a maximum realized price of USD 368,997 for a painting and a separate maximum of USD 6,773 for a work in another category, but it does not disclose the specific work, auction house, or sale date behind either figure. A painting catalogued as Lucy-E-001 has appeared as a lot at Christie's Hong Kong, and a work catalogued as Lucy-L-001 has appeared in a Phillips Hong Kong day sale held in association with Poly Auction, but the sources available for this profile do not confirm a hammer price or exact sale date for either lot. Given these gaps, Ye Linghan's auction high should be read as an approximate figure near USD 369,000 rather than a precisely dated record, and overall public sale volume for the artist remains small.

Ye Linghan's public auction history is thin and imprecise. Aggregated auction data points to a maximum realized price near USD 369,000 for a painting, but the specific work, auction house, and sale date behind that figure are not independently confirmed, and only a small number of lots have appeared at auction overall. There is no catalogue raisonne, and verification of works currently runs through SPURS Gallery and the other galleries that have exhibited him. Given the limited and imprecisely documented auction record, collectors should treat any public price reference for this artist as approximate rather than as evidence of a stable market.