Blue Diamond Eastern Song (35×33 signed & numbered serigraph on paper)

Ting Shao Kuang (Shaoguang Ding) Artwork

Considered a leader of the Chinese art movement known as the Yunnan School, Ting Shao Kuang creates exotic figurative paintings and serigraphs that combine eastern and western aesthetics. Using strong jewel tone color and erotic female imagery, the artist merges the ideological and traditional forms of Egyptian art with the more decorative and risque elements of Art Nouveau.

Early Life:

Shaoguang Ding, AKA Ting Shao Kuang was born in Chenggu, a village located in the Northern province of Shanxi, China in 1939.  After graduating from art school, he was sent to rural Yunnan Province with Tiefeng Jiang and numerous other artists during Mao’s Cultural revolution where he was instructed to paint traditional Chinese subjects as well as propaganda posters.

Something New

Instead, he began to use his previous training and exposure to western art to create a new style that fused elements of Western art such as Cubism and Art Nouveau with more primitive forms like Egyptian art and the area’s numerous cave paintings. He was also inspired by the Yunnan region’s lush color and diverse ethnic and religious culture as he incorporated traditional symbolism and customs. Ting’s purposeful marriage of ancient art customs, masterful brush strokes, and calligraphic lines, mixed with the starkness and beauty of modernism, have made his works some of the most recognizable in the world. He is considered a world-renowned leader of the Yunnan School by the American art critic Douglas Finly. Japanese art critic Murobushi thinks him an exceptionally authentic Chinese artist, and French art critic Andre Parinaud once commented that “His art has a timeless exuberance, and its exultation of love has turned him into a 20th century Giotto.”

Career:

Living in the United States since 1980, Ting Shao Kuang has had more than one hundred personal exhibitions in America, Japan, Canada, Greece, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and became a force in the international art world during the late 1980’s.