Born in Hetian, Xinjiang, Shao Wenhuan lived in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province during his childhood. In 2002, he did his post-graduate at the Deparment of Comprehensive Painting at the China Academy of Art, during which he did a residency at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Dijon, France. Currently Shao lives in Hangzhou and is an associate professor in the photography department of the Chinese Academy of Fine Arts.

Shao Wenhuan is one of the most well-known artists in the field of contemporary Chinese photography. His work combines the means of photography and painting. His artistic creation is deeply rooted in traditional aesthetics and he constantly blurs the established boundaries of photography and painting, known as "the photography with spiritual depth." The desire to watch the "objective world" made Shao Wenhuan turn from painting to photography, which did not satisfy the wait and see, and drove Shao Wenhuan to practice directly on the silver salt film, making photography a painting. The fusion of "the aesthetics of painting and the realism of photography" makes Shao’s work unique.

In the new works "Floating Jade", Shao Wenhuan has adopted another way to pay tribute to the traditional landscapes. He refers to ancient paintings (such as the "Xiaogxiang Paintings" of the five generations of Dong Yuan), 3D model and photoreaslitic rendering effects used in block-bluster films to create a fairy isle in the sea. Essentially, this kind of picture is "anti-photography", a new genre of "painting" in the digital technology generation.