Li Jin 李津 (b. 1958)

Li Jin is one of the best-known and loved yet unorthodox painters of the New Literati Group which are mostly artists born between the 1940s-1960s who experienced both the New China and the Cultural Revolution. It is a coincidental movement that reflected the social and political changes after the Cultural Revolution. An iconic feature of their work is to use Classical Chinese methods like ink painting and use Western images such as Li’s famous comics to create a fresh style expressing contemporary Chinese painting in contrast to classics and “revolutionary model” painting.

Li developed his uniquely playful style in the early 1990s and is now famous for images of food and wine and simple pleasures of the good life. The central debauched figure in all his work is a self-portrait while the young women are his ideal female beauties. The work we own is the cover of “Chinese Ink paintings Now”.

His paintings are in the collections of the National Art Museum of China, Beijing, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Seattle, Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hammer Museum Los Angeles, museums of California universities in Berkeley and San Francisco, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Li currently teaches Chinese painting at Tianjin Academy of Art.