"Vessel" Painting

Nini Sum is an artist based in Berlin and Shanghai. She works across screen printing, collage, and sculpture, a practice built on material experimentation over more than 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. She has also collaborated with brands including The Macallan, Adidas, Adobe, and Jo Malone.