Nini Sum is an artist based in Berlin and Shanghai. She works across screen printing, collage, and sculpture, building a practice that has followed a single material - wood - for over fifteen years.
She grew up in Nanjing, one of China's most densely forested cities, and the texture, shadow, and smell of trees shaped her relationship to making before she had a name for it. That material memory runs through everything: the tree ring first appeared in her work as a printed surface, then became the structural body of her objects, and in her most recent sculpture series Shēngshēng it finally moves into three dimensions - the ring cut, printed, and built by hand into forms that hold something living at their center.
In 2010 she founded IdleBeats in Shanghai, China's first independent screen printing studio, which she ran for thirteen years. That practice -layering ink, building surfaces, working with the resistance and grain of physical material, defined her technical language and her understanding of what making by hand means.
Her Urban Landscape collage series (2019-2023) brought together classical Chinese Shanshui(ink landscape painting) imagery and contemporary urban fragments, exploring the dissolution of boundaries between past and present, nature and city. ZERO (2025), a series of screen-printed wood wall objects, pushed the tree ring from surface into form. Shēngshēng, her ongoing sculpture series, takes that progression further: freestanding works in which the ring moves into three dimensions, each piece built entirely by hand.
Her work has been exhibited internationally across China, Germany, the United States, Belgium, the Netherlands, Australia, Norway, Finland, and Singapore, and was included in Poly Auction Beijing in 2021.
Education
2004–2008 BA Visual Communication, School of Design, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, China
Solo Exhibitions
2023 Space Walk - Artist-in-Residence Solo Exhibition, Kunstraum des Konfuzius-instituts, Nürnberg, Germany
2012 See·Saw - Solo Exhibition, Identity Art Gallery, Hong Kong
Group Exhibitions (Selected)
2020–2021 Worlds On Paper, Art Labor Gallery, Shanghai, China
2020 Untitled and Unlimited, Times Museum, Poly Art Center, Beijing, China
2019–2020 China Europe Illustrations and Images Exhibition, Helsinki, Finland
2019 The Drawing Hand, Danysz Gallery, Shanghai, China
2019 Anime, Kult Gallery, Singapore
2018 Tale Of Two Cities #4, The Space Gallery, Shanghai, China
2017 Screen Punch, Con Artist Gallery, New York, USA
2017 Tale Of Two Cities #3, Art Labor Gallery, Shanghai, China
2017 Torino Graphic Days, Turin, Italy
2017 MAPS, Newsagency Gallery, Sydney, Australia
2017 PSA 5th Anniversary Exhibition, Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China
2016 Tale Of Two Cities #2, PlayClass, Shanghai, China
2016 Facing the Climate, The Swedish Institute & Consulate General of Sweden, Shanghai, China
2015 No Man's Art Pop Up Gallery, Oslo, Norway
2015 Tale Of Two Cities #1, UNDEFINE M50, Shanghai, China
2014 Chinese Spring #2, Stieglitz19 Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium
2014 Art Print Asia, Newsagency Gallery, Sydney, Australia
2014 Shanghai Dangdai, No Man's Art Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands
2013 Druck Berlin, UrbanSpree, Berlin, Germany
2013 Dualities 2: The State of Innocence, Identity Art Gallery, Hong Kong
2013 No Man's Art Pop Up Gallery Shanghai, Wharf 1846, Shanghai, China
2012 Spot Light - China Youth Art Exhibition, Bund 18 Gallery, Shanghai, China
Auction
2021 Barbershop (First Edition), Poly Auction, Beijing, China
Press (Selected)
BBC, CNN, Shanghai Daily, Adobe Creative Leaders, i-D, Creators Project (Vice), Elle, People of Print, RADII, Design 360, That's Shanghai