Born in Guilin, China in 1974, Li Tianbing studied at the Institute of International Relations in Beijing before graduating in 2002 from the Ecole Supérieure Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris As Li Tianbing moved to Paris in 1996 to study art at Ecole des Beaux Arts, he continued to search for an identity that was his own, travelling back and forth to his home country to stay connected with his heritage and roots Fusing both cultures, the artist incorporates traditional Chinese motifs into Western forms of interpretation The artist also delves in photography and often employs the pictures he takes as a starting point to create paintings

Li Tianbing explores fiction and reality haunted by selected childhood memories in a suffocating society and charged political setting Using photographs as a medium to illustrate his reflections on the past and his multicultural experiences, Li layers the present using oil painting in a timeless duality Reflections on loneliness are addressed in a symbolic fashion across Li’s art, reflecting his suffering instilled by the single child policy The interpretation of his work incorporates personal identity and drama in a tale with the infiltration of multicultural factors Li Tianbing’s body of work is characterized by the dual influence of the Far-East and the West: the first being a legacy of Chinese painting imbued with Taoism, the second coming from the teachings of art professors such as Vladimir Velickovic, Christian Boltanski and Giuseppe Penone while he studied at the Fine Arts School in Paris A selection of the exhibitions Li has participated includes: Today Art Museum, Beijing; Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai; National Museum of Fine Arts, Beijing, China and Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Spain Today, Li Tianbing’s works of art are found both in public and private collections: The Hong Kong Arts Centre, the M+ Museum and the Uli Sigg Collection in Hong Kong; the China National Museum of Fine Arts a