Qiao was born in 1968 in Xuzhou in the northern part of Jiangsu Province and over the years has worked in a range of different materials. He is much admired in the Far East as both a sculptor and an academic and has had many papers published on sculpture and art in general, as well as having staged a number of exhibitions since first showing to the public in Beijing in 1999.
Chen Peiyi, the Associate Editor of Chinese Sculpture Magazine, wrote: "In China we have splendid sculptors and remarkable theorists, while Qiao Qian is just the only artist I have ever seen who can do a good job in both fields."
Qiao Qian draws on a number of different facets of his life in creating his figures. On the one hand, his was a childhood spent in relative poverty in the countryside, where he recalls "serene villages, shady rivers and old trees standing in the moonlight". On the other hand, these were times also dominated by the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution in China.
