This folder contains photographs of Jin’s selected sculpture works created between the early 1990s and 2005; documents of contemporary art exhibitions Jin participated in from 1998 to 2001 in Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai, and other cities; photographs taken whilst studying at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and other occasions; and a small amount of clippings about his work.

Jin Le, artist, art educator, and founder of Shijiezi Art Museum, was born in Shijiezi village of Gansu Province in 1966. He studied at the Department of Sculpture at Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts from 1986 to 1991. After a year working as a product designer in Shenzhen, Jin returned to Gansu in 1992 and started teaching at the Department of Fine Arts at Northwest Normal University. In 1998, Jin went to Beijing to attend a study programme at Central Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied with artist Sui Jianguo and started to participate in contemporary art exhibitions, including The Second Yearlong Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition (Shenzhen, 1999), Fuck Off (Shanghai, 2000), and Man/Animal: Animal Games Performance Art Exhibition (Jilin, 2000), among others. Jin returned to Gansu in 2000 for family reasons. He began considering the relevance of contemporary art for the remote village of his birth, and started by staging a few performance art pieces there. In 2007, Jin and other villagers from Shijiezi participated in Ai Weiwei’s Fairytale project at Documenta XII. In 2008, Jin officially launched the Shijiezi Village Art Museum project, and was later elected as the chief of the village. He is currently a Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts of Northwest Normal University.