Born in Shanghai in 1972, Maleonn studied Fine Arts since he was a child. He graduated from Shanghai Huashan Art School, followed by the Fine Arts College of Shanghai University, after which he has engaged in commercial video as an artistic supervisor and director.

In 2003, Maleonn began to dive into photography, organizing more than 30 solo exhibitions around the world and participated in more than 100 important group exhibitions of photography and contemporary art. In 2012, he created the artistic project Studio Mobile, an ephemeral photography studio in a truck and station wagon. In 10 months, he traveled to 35 cities in China, capturing more than 30,000 wedding photos and family portraits for 1,600 strangers for free. There were more than 20,000 participants. From 2010 to 2014, he published two collections of essays: The Confessions and Confessions of an Undercover Man, both of which aroused wide interest. From 2014 to 2017, in order to pay tribute to his father’s suffering from Alzheimer’s, the artist spent three years directing a large-scale play entitled Dad’s Time Machine, featuring a human-sized puppet. This became the first Chinese work being selected for the drama unit at the annual congress of International Society for the Performing Arts (ISPA). In the second half of 2017, Maleonn returned to the field of photographic creation. In 2020, the documentary “Our time machine”, which was filmed in his drama creation, was nominated for the Best Documentary in the American Gotham award. In 2021, “Our time machine” was nominated again for Best Cultural Documentary at the Emmy Awards.