Ni Youyu was born in Jiangxi, China in 1984, and graduated from the Chinese Painting Department of the Fine Arts College of Shanghai University in 2007. Ni won the Best Young Artist Award in the China Contemporary Art Awards (CCAA) in 2014. Throughout his diverse body of work in painting, printmaking, sculpture, installation, and video, Ni Youyu often draws inspiration from the aesthetics and philosophy of traditional Chinese in paintings. His main solo exhibitions in recent years include: “Simplified History”, “Inseparable Image”, “Bubble”, “Inch Time”, “Ni Youyu” (Hong Kong Basel Personal Project 2015). His works have also been collected by many art institutions, including the Swiss Ghisla Art Collection Foundation, the Singapore Art Museum, the Hong Kong M+ Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the me Collectors Room in Berlin, the Arario Art Museum in South Korea, the Art Museum in Nanjing, China, and Sydney, Australia. White Rabbit Art Museum, Paris DSL Collection Foundation, Swiss Hick Collection Foundation, etc. Ni currently lives and works in Shanghai, China.

Ni Youyu is one of the rare artists in the field of contemporary art who builds a system of divergent art. His creation spans a variety of media, including painting, photography, collage, installation, sculpture, etc., and the series of works that are in parallel but greatly different are directed to each other, presenting the artist's thinking with a certain depth and breadth.

The artist has begun developing his The "Freewheeling Trip" series of old photo collages since 2012. Ni has collected tens of thousands of old photos taken by unnamed photographers all over the world for many years. He classifies them one by one, and finally The "anti-photoshop" approach cuts, reorganizes and gradually collages these old photos. Photography is no longer photography, but a fragment of time and space.