Mao Lizi moved to Beijing with his family and began to study painting at a young age.

[1] Mao Lizi is one of the founding members of the Stars, and featured in the 1979 exhibition, as well as subsequent retrospectives.

His work has since been shown in solo and group exhibitions in New York, Paris, and Hong Kong,[3] as well as in China, including at Long museum in Shanghai, in the exhibition Experiencing Simplicity: Realistic Paintings from Long Collection.

[4] In 2019, Mao Lizi had a solo exhibition in the recently opened space of the gallery A&R Fleury in Avenue Matignon, Paris.

[5] Mael Bellec, the curator of the Cernuschi Museum, wrote on the occasion of this exhibition a text evoking the historical context of the artist as one of the members of the Stars: "The variety of styles employed by Mao Lizi, in a figurative vein marked by hyperrealism to the abstract compositions of more recent years is a striking testimony of the way in which the heritage of the Stars continues".