Sui Jianguo, one of China’s most celebrated contemporary artists, came to prominence internationally in the 1990s with sculptures that questioned China’s new role as a global superpower.

Originally trained in Western-based Socialist Realism during the Cultural Revolution, Sui’s Mao works, for which he first came to international attention, depicted the ubiquitous jacket of Chairman Mao, reconfigured as a series of empty shells. As China shifts from communist to capitalist, Sui Jianguo accurately captures the contradiction and change.

Sui Jianguo has exhibited extensively, including in the group exhibitions Memory and Contemporaneity: China Art Today, 57th Venice Biennale 2017; Blackness in Abstraction, PACE, New York and the 9th Shanghai Biennale 2012. Solo exhibitions include the major survey exhibition System: Sui Jianguo 2008–2018, OCAT, Shenzhen; Stampede, Denver Art Museum, 2017 and Birth of Legacy Mantle, Art6 Docklands, Melbourne, Australia, 2017. He lives and works in Beijing and is represented internationally by PACE.