Lu Renjie

Born in Shanghai in 1982, Lu Renjie drew and modelled clay from childhood and studied as a young man under Chen Zhaochi. He worked as a magazine illustrator and taught animation for five years before his commissioned works for Jackie Chan brought him a first circle of collectors.

His central project, Lu Renjie's World of the Shanhai Jing, is the first complete physical rendering of the Classic: hundreds of hand-built figures scanned at 0.02 mm and multiplied into a 340 m² terrain, a hundred-metre map, immersive light and a private museum in Songjiang that holds over a thousand sculptures and a hundred paintings.

Alongside the Classic he reads the Book of Changes and the Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic as the other two of 'Three Books' — heaven, humanity, earth — and treats the wider traditions of Chinese civilisation as an expansion layer: literature, bronze, gardens, folk custom, opera, craft. The atelier's rule is his: no walls in the making, no vagueness about the source.

His works are held in private collections in China, Hong Kong and abroad; the 12.8-metre China Dragon is in the collection of a film-art museum; he has received the Florence Prize for Literature and Visual Arts and has been profiled by CCTV and Dragon TV.

Selected historical commissions for Jackie Chan; works held in private collections in Asia, Europe and North America.