Zhang Enli was born in Jilin Province in 1965. He graduated from the Arts & Design Institute of Wuxi Technical University (now a part of Jiangnan University) in 1989 and taught at the Arts and Design Institute of Donghua University afterwards. He currently lives and works in Shanghai. Zhang Enli’s œuvre can be roughly divided into three categories: figurative paintings from the 1990s that focus on ordinary people and their lives, still-life paintings after the 2000s depicting various “containers” that trace the passage of time, and, more recently, abstract paintings that record memory and explore the subconscious. Since 2007, his “Space Painting” series mobilizes the viewer’s bodily experience amidst a symphony of time and space, thus stimulating new possibilities in one of the world’s oldest mediums, pulling oil painting towards a new direction.