Ou Ning started writing poems and publishing underground magazines from 1986 when he was a high school student, then got involved in the Chinese Avant-Garde Poetry Movement during the end of 1980' and the beginning of 1990'.
In 1999, he published the journal Filmakers, founded the independent film and video organization U-thèque, hold weekly screening and discussion events in the cafes, bars and bookshops in Shenzhen and Guangzhou.
[5] With curators Beatrice Galilee, Kayoko Ota, Weiwei Shannon and Pauline J. Yao, his full woman curatorial team, taking the theme of "City Mobilization", Ou proposed an investigation into the organization and balance of social life within contemporary urban China.
"City Mobilization", opened on 6 December 2009 and continued to 23 January 2010, the exhibition featured approximately 60 artists and architects from around the world presenting newly created works in Shenzhen.
A critically acclaimed literary magazine, found by Ou Ning under the Modern Media Group in 2011, stopped publication in 2014 for mainly financial reasons.