Yu Ji

Yu Ji was born in 1985 in Shanghai, China, and builds a practice across sculpture, installation, performance, and video, often combining stone, construction rubble, and organic material into bodily, weathered forms that speak to labor, urban transformation, and memory. She earned a graduate degree, described in different gallery biographies as either an MA or an MFA, from the Department of Sculpture, College of Art at Shanghai University, in 2011. In 2008, while still a student, she co-founded AM Art Space, an artist-run, non-profit space in Shanghai that supported experimental practice and exchange.

Her exhibition history accelerated through the mid-2010s, with inclusion in the 11th Shanghai Biennale and 11th Gwangju Biennale in 2016, and a 2017 shortlisting for the HUGO BOSS Asia Art Award for Emerging Asian Artists. In 2019 she was included in the 58th Venice Biennale, May You Live in Interesting Times, and by the early 2020s she was mounting institutional solo shows at Sadie Coles HQ in London (2022), the Orange County Museum of Art and CCA Berlin (both 2023), and Centro Pecci in Prato, Italy (2024). She was shortlisted for the Sigg Prize 2023, with work shown at M+ in Hong Kong. In 2026 she opened her first solo exhibition in New York, Origin of the Tiger, at P.P.O.W, and her work was included that year in a group presentation at the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale in Saudi Arabia. Gallery and institutional biographies describe her as based primarily in Shanghai, with some more recent sources also citing time in Vienna and New York.

Critical and curatorial attention has followed Yu Ji's rapid rise since her inclusion in the 2019 Venice Biennale, with art press describing a trajectory from Shanghai's independent art scene to major biennials, European kunsthalles, and American museums within a decade. Curators and institutions have consistently framed her sculptural practice, built from rubble, stone, and organic matter, as a way of registering the physical and social costs of urban change and labor, a reading reinforced by her selection for the Sigg Prize in 2023 and by feature coverage in outlets such as Artforum and Artnet in the years following. No verbatim critical assessment could be confirmed with exact wording and attribution for this profile, so none is quoted here.

Yu Ji's market runs primarily through the primary market, via her representing galleries P.P.O.W in New York and Kiang Malingue in Hong Kong. Aggregated auction-tracking data point to some secondary-market activity, including a reported high-water figure in the low seven figures for a work on paper, but no fully documented top-line auction result, specific title, sale house, or exact date could be independently confirmed from primary auction sources as of this writing. There is no catalogue raisonne, consistent with an artist still in the earlier stages of a fast-developing international career.

Yu Ji's profile is built on institutional and curatorial validation, biennials, museum solo shows, and a major prize shortlisting, rather than on a long or well-documented auction history. Collectors should treat any secondary-market price data currently circulating with caution, since a verified top auction result with title, house, and date is not yet publicly established. Works are best acquired and authenticated through her representing galleries, and provenance history is comparatively short given the artist's stage of career.