He began piano lessons at the age of three with Professor Zhu Ya-Fen. At the age of five he won the Shenyang Piano Competition and played his first public recital. He entered Beijing's Central Music Conservatory when he was nine, studying with Professor Zhao Ping-Guo. At the age of 11, he won the first prize and award for outstanding artistic performance at the Fourth International Young Pianists Competition in Germany. In 1995 at 13 years of age, he played the complete Chopin 24 Etudes at Beijing Concert Hall and won first prize at the Tchaikovsky International Young Musicians' Competition in Japan, where he performed the Chopin Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra in a concert broadcast by NHK Television. At 14 he was a featured soloist at the China National Symphony's inaugural concert, broadcast by CCTV and attended by President Jiang Zemin. The following year he began studies with Gary Graffman at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia.

Lang Lang's breakthrough came in 1999, when he was 17, with his dramatic last-minute substitution (introduced by Isaac Stern) for an indisposed André Watts at the Ravinia Festival's "Gala of the Century", in which he played Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (conducted by Christoph Eschenbach). The Chicago Tribune called him the biggest, most exciting keyboard talent encountered in many years. In 2001 he made his sold-out Carnegie Hall debut with Yuri Temirkanov, travelled to Beijing with the Philadelphia Orchestra on a tour celebrating its 100th anniversary, during which he performed to an audience of 8,000 at the Great Hall of the People, and made an acclaimed BBC Proms debut, prompting The Times of London's critic to write: "Lang Lang took a sold-out Royal Albert Hall by storm... This could well be history in the making." In 2003, he returned to the BBC Proms for the First Night concert with Leonard Slatkin. After his recent recital debut in the Berlin Philharmonic, the Berliner Zeitung wrote: "Lang Lang is a superb musical performer whose artistic touch is always in service of the music."

Lang Lang records exclusively for Deutsche Grammophon.