PIFO Gallery presents Ni Jun’s solo exhibition “Ni Jun: An Inconvenient Case” curated by art historian Mia Yu on May 16, 2019. Spanning over forty years, Ni Jun’s extraordinary career cannot be conveniently framed within any single narrative. By presenting important works and archives from different stages of Ni’s career, the exhibition attempts to situate the artist’s oeuvre in the intersections and entanglements of art historical and personal trajectories. Born in 1963, Ni Jun entered the high school attached to the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. After graduation, Ni Jun continued to study art at the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts with prominent modern painters. The academic training that Ni Jun received was derived from the Socialist Realist tradition and afforded him with solid skills as a realist painter. In 1989, Ni Jun moved to the U.S. to study at Rutgers University. After having traveled all over the U.S. and seen all sorts of art, Ni Jun still maintained a fervent devotion to painting, the “outmoded” medium, and kept a distance from the fashionable trends in contemporary art. Upon returning to China in 2001, Ni Jun shifted his focus to learn from the pioneers of Chinese modern art while trying to synthesize and internalize the essences of the 19th-century Realist painting and the Song-dynasty painting.