Ning Lee was born in Chongqing, a city in Southwest China. He studied at the School of Fine Arts at Southwest Normal University, where he received seven years of professional training with a focus on realistic approach. After obtaining his BFA and MFA from the School of Fine Arts at Southwest Normal University in 1987, he started a teaching career at the Department Oil Painting at the same school. Ning worked as a visiting artist at various art centers both in the United States and Canada in the early 1990s and finally settled down in New York metro area in 1996.  He has exhibited in China, Canada and United States, received various awards, and has works in corporate and private collections in the US and abroad.

Although Ning enjoys creating landscape and figurative work, it is still life subject matter that he is most passionate about. Guided by a special perspective to light, shadow, color and form, he paints the objects commonly seen in daily life with a contemporary realistic approach that has distinguished his paintings by an element of orderliness, serenity, rationality and harmony, in addition to a slightly surrealistic edge.  Inspired by the Renaissance masters and the seventeenth century Dutch masters; he applies his outstanding realistic skills acquired through years of academic trainings into creating still life paintings of long-lasting beauty.