Born in Shaoxing, Zhejiang, China in 1981, Li Qing graduated from the Oil Painting Department of the China Academy of Art (CAA). He received his master's degree in 2012. He is currently teaching at the Oil Painting Department of the CAA and living in Shanghai and Hangzhou. Using various subjects including everyday reality, emotional life, news events, historical memory and art history images, Li Qing puts painting in paradoxical mirror games. Behind his conceptual creations is a sensibility between illusion and reality, time and existence. Since 2011, Li Qing has been working on the series “Adjacent Windows”. He combines the physical objects of old window panes and frames with paintings outside the window. When the viewer observes this virtual landscape, the familiar view creates a feeling of estranged distance. Recent solo exhibitions include: "Seaview" (2017, Fritz Expo, New York, USA), "Li Qing Personal Project" (2016, Hong Kong Contemporary Tang Art Center), "Eight Sets" (2015, Seoul Arario Museum), " Cathedral (2015, Beijing Beehive Contemporary Art Center) and "Zoom in" (2014, German-based Consulate General of Shanghai Cultural and Education Office Goethe Institute). His recent series of “Seascapes” was exhibited at the 2017 New York Frieze Expo in the form of a Solo Project and won the Jean-Francois Prat Award in Paris, France.

The artist believes that the sea is a very permanent theme relative to human life, and it often appears in today's cultural products, such as movies, photography, or advertisements, but its form is very different from the seascape paintings in Western paintings. The religious and divine forces in Western seascape paintings have been converted into a kind of psychological consumption. Li Qing discovered that the sea imagery as a cultural product of a contemporary society, the emotions it causes are also designed and calculate. So he uses the image of a commercialized painting, but deliberately removes the centre. It is his way to question the audience their accustomed viewing habits.