Born in Hubei in 1986, graduated from the oil painting department of Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 2009. He moved from Beijing to Shanghai in 2018. His work involves multiple media such as video, performance, painting, installation and writing, etc. In recent years, he embarked on a journey surveying the antagonist roles in theatre, stage art, make-up design, the production of imported films and espionage films since 1950s in China. The artist often writes images through collections of photo documents, character scenes, and dubbed monologues. Meanwhile, he also expands the more complex and personalized time and space of this writing in painting, sound, and installation.
Li Ran has exhibited at the Center Pompidou, Pairs; basis door actuele kunst (BAK), Utrecht; Huas der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), Houston; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal; The Museum of Moscow, Moscow; Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Geneva; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; NTU Center For Contemporary Art Singapore (CCA), Singapore; Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), Manila; HOW Museum, Shanghai, Sifang Museum, Nanjing; OCT Contemporary Art Terminal (OCAT), Shenzhen, Shanghai and Xi’an; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), Beijing; CAFA Museum (CAFAM), Beijing; and other venues, He has held solo exhibition at OCT Contemporary Art Terminal (OCAT), Xi’an (2015); His single-channel video work also screening in Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London; The Jewish Museum, New York and other venues; His works have also been featured in Montreal Biennale (2014), Biennale Of Moving Images 2014 (2014 In Geneva), 4th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2014), 2nd CAFAM Biennial (2014), 4th “Former West” Project (2013, In Berlin), 9th Gwangju Biennial (2012), 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale (2012). He won the “Best Artist Award” at the 2014 Moscow International Youth Art Biennial and was nominated for the “Future Generation
Award” by the Pinchuk Arts Center in 2017.