Les collages de Ding Liren - June 13 through October 26, 2025

The Collection de l’Art Brut is holding a solo show of works by Chinese artist Ding Liren. The exhibition will feature 39 collages on loan from the artist, all shown in Europe for the first time.

Ding Liren was born in 1930 and grew up in a rural area of Jiangsu province in eastern China. As a child, he became fascinated by the many and varied insects he encountered in his home village: grasshoppers, beetles, mosquitoes, bees, butterflies, dragonflies, locusts and more. From the age of five, he would spend time observing the way they flew and listening intently to their calls, buzzes and whistles. He and his school friends also collected beetles, making little wooden huts for them, feeding them and even tending to their offspring across multiple generations.

Ding’s curiosity for nature led him to study biology, although he harboured an obvious interest in fine art. In the late 1950s, he joined an entomology research centre, where he devoted his time to painting insects. Insect painting is a fully fledged genre of traditional Chinese art: entomology labs commonly hire artists to produce scientific depictions of insects, and the resulting works may be displayed in natural history museums. Ding spent several years producing standardised, naturalistic paintings of dried specimens, working eight hours a day.

Ding later taught decorative arts: first at a school in Shanghai in 1989, and then at a university in Guangdong in the 1990s. When he retired, he reconnected with his first love: insects. Fascinated by their vital energy, he seeks to reproduce not their formal beauty, but instead their lives – their movements, postures, cycles and flight – using collage, a technique he taught himself, as his medium of expression. The works on display at the Collection de l’Art Brut depict two types of insects: beetles and grasshoppers. Their forms, postures, colours and movements vary from one piece to the next, reflecting the distinctive features of each subject. Ding’s collages, made from illustrations and advertising images cut out from magazines, offer a fascinating insight into the sheer diversity of insect life.

Ding’s works are held in the collections of several museums in China. These include the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, which, in July 2025, will host the first major outsider art show in China, a collaborative venture with the Collection de l’Art Brut.

Curated by Sarah Lombardi, director, Collection de l’Art Brut