Jani Leinonen was born in Hyvinkää, Finland in 1978. He graduated from Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2002. Jani Leinonen plays with the systems of commodity exchange and celebrity, and the marketing strategies through which they operate.

Leinonen's installations are shops, bars, slot machines but also plain painting exhibitions. Leinonen immerses himself in these processes instead of simply criticising them, and allows for everything to feed back into the work. Even when the press starts reporting on his projects, this very reporting is integrated back into the work as part of its material. What is displayed, though, are not goods but an artistic allegorisation that appropriates these marketing strategies only in order to unhinge their underlying assumptions about value and appropriateness. Leinonen has said to have three goals in his art: "I want to make an artwork that will be stolen from a museum, to make an artwork that will end up pirate production in Shanghai, and I want to become so famous that Damien Hirst's mother knows me." He aims at revealing the hidden codes behind seemingly neutral images and displays.