Li Ji was born in Kunming, Yunnan Province in 1963. He graduated from the Sichuan Art Academy in 1987 and completed his graduate studies at the Printing Department of the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing in 1990. He is an accomplished print-maker, but Li Ji is best known for his works in oil on canvas where his vision, mastery and comments on modern society are manifest. Li Ji's works have been exhibited internationally and acquired by private and public collections in the United States, Europe and Asia. He is currently vice professor of the Yunnan Art Academy.

One will always remember Li Ji for his portrayal of sensuous women and their pets. Few artists today would dare to combine the two without being confronted by the idea of kitsch. Li Ji's painting, on the other hand, with its derisive and beautifully executed surface, targets the dark side of today's fast-growing materialistic culture: decadence and vulgarity. Li Ji's women range from beautiful housewives, to mistresses and fashion models. His early paintings often focused on the body beneath the head, thus the women were featureless and without identity. Animals (either gibbons, cats or pigs) clung to the body in a sexual position and their human expressions infered lust, desire and possession. More recently Li Ji has incorporated whole female figures into his Pet Series, often the same protagonists sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs. Their grey flesh-tones seem cold and sordid against the often brightly-coloured backgrounds, and their apathetic faces are haggered and tired, emphasized by their shiny bright-red lipstick.

The works from the Pet Series featured in the exhibition Three Artists from Kunming (Hong Kong, 1999) reflect the artist's opinions on the fashion industry and commercialism. They feature beautifully dressed torsos, impersonal models taken from the catwalk, representing superficial qualities such as external beauty and the desire to have a perfect body. A male gibbon, symbol of man, clings to each torso in various sexually arousing positions, serving as her loyal companion. In today's society, the possession of a model's body and a small pet could represent a woman's elevated class. The women in Li Ji's paintings, however, with beauty and youth their only assets, convey nothing but loneliness and the emptiness of a hollow shell.

Li Ji's recent paintings continue to explore the allegorical potential of combining woman and animals. In one work, the pig (a word commonly used to refer to perverted males) is depicted lying happily on the torso of a beautiful woman with its tongue licking her breast. The woman does not appear to be enjoying this in any way, but continues to pose as a model with her arms raised and hips tilted. The message is clear: the women and the animals are put together in the most intimate environment, yet they are fully absorbed in their own moment and are totally indifferent to eachother. Li Ji's paintings thus raise the question of obsession and possession. As one critic observed, "These women represent modern 'concubines' owned by wealthy men. Their relationships are purely financial and physical. The small animals are the possession of the women in the painting, but in reality, these women are also someone else's belongings or possessions."