About

Li Zhi, born Li Junjie, studied Eastern and Western traditional art through apprenticeship from an early age. He now divides his time between Beijing and Vancouver, working in photography and mixed-media painting. In his practice, he traces the formal lineages of Chinese and European painting traditions while gradually returning, in spirit, to the Eastern cultural lineage—from the influence of Confucian thought toward the root sensibility of Daoism, and from study in the studio to walking through the mountains, experiencing the ceaseless flow of breath among peaks, rivers, plants, and the natural world. His ongoing artistic aim is to bring the spirit and craft of classical Chinese art into contemporary contexts of photography and painting. In 2013, he completed his first photobook, *Warm Lens* (*温暖的镜头*), which entered the collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. From 2012 to 2026, over fourteen years of travel through the landscape, he completed the landscape photography series *Asking Water*, *Mountain Journey*, *Honggu Valley*, *Stream and Mountain*, *Silent Before Rivers and Mountains*, and *Landscape of Pure Sound*. Selected works have been shown in China, France, and the United States, with a sustained impact in the field of photography; interviews have appeared in *China Photography*, *Life Monthly*, *China Photography News*, and other professional publications. Tens of thousands of words from his photographic and painterly essays, *Idle Talk at Huai Studio* (*槐下居闲话*), Volume I, were published in the inaugural issue of *Poetry and Thought* (*诗与思*), the journal of the China Contemporary Poetry Academy. Since 2020, his new landscape paintings have been selected multiple times for the China Mixed Media Painting Biennial, exhibited at the Ningbo Art Museum. In the same period, he began participating in the Beijing Contemporary Art Fair, presenting his explorations across landscape photography and painting.