James Jean was born in Taiwan and attended the School of Visual Arts in New York. He currently lives and works Los Angeles.

Renowned for his virtuosic ability to work across different genres with an imaginative and multifaceted approach to image making, Jean fuses contemporary subjects with aesthetic techniques inspired by traditional Chinese scroll paintings, Japanese woodblock prints, and Renaissance portraiture. By experimenting with different styles and art-historical genres, Jean depicts detailed cosmological worlds that focus on both individual and universal experiences. Layered with imagery drawn from contemporary culture and age-old allegories, he imagines a collective realm of mythological proportions.

After a groundbreaking collaboration with Prada for their fabled Spring/Summer 2008 collection, Jean has returned after a decade for Prada's Spring/Summer 2018 collection.

Along with exhibitions at major museums around the world and collaborations with the likes of Prada and Apple, James still returns to his roots as a cover artist, having designed many film posters, including Everything Everywhere All At Once and The Shape of Water, which won Best Picture at the Oscars in 2018. This mix of fine art and popular culture is emblematic of James' career as a whole. It's the juxtapositions in his work that create the magic. Inferno (2019), for example, is an epic remake of Jigoku Zoshi, or Hell Scroll, a famous 12th-century Japanese scroll painting. Effortlessly mixing old and new, East and West, digital and analogue, James finds a perfect harmony between opposites – a dreamy balance of history and our modern day world.