Jia Aili (b. 1979, Dandong, China) is a Chinese contemporary artist celebrated for his large-scale, psychologically charged paintings that blend realism, fantasy, and dystopian allegory. Trained at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts, Jia’s work reflects the complexities of a rapidly transforming China while grappling with universal themes of technology, mortality, and isolation.

His canvases—often vast in scale and populated by fragmented bodies, surreal machinery, and desolate landscapes—evoke both post-apocalyptic anxiety and spiritual introspection. Merging classical painting techniques with a distinctly modern sensibility, Jia’s visual language recalls both Western art history and Chinese Socialist Realism, filtered through a lens of existential unease.

Deeply influenced by literature, philosophy, and science, Jia Aili creates emotionally resonant works that suggest both collapse and renewal. Figures drift through his compositions in astronaut suits, gas masks, or states of undress—symbols of both fragility and resistance in a changing world.

Jia’s practice challenges the boundaries between personal and collective trauma, and between past and future. His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions such as the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Palais de Tokyo, and the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), and is included in major public and private collections worldwide.

“ Painting is not a reproduction of the objective world, but meticulous care of the spirit. „

—Jia Aili