Skip to main content
Want more images or videos?
Request additional images or videos from the seller
1 of 9

Ting Shao Kuang
Ancient Civilization

1996

About the Item

This artwork titled "Ancient Civilization" 1996, is an original color serigraph on thin rice paper taped to a sheet of wove paper for stabilization by noted Chinese artist Ting Shao Kuang, b.1939. It is unsigned as issue. There is a hand signed and numbered edition of the same image. The artwork (image) size is 24 x 23.35 inches, rice paper sheet is 28.5 x 27.25 inches, backing wove paper sheet is 30.5 x 29.25 inches. This artwork is a trial (test) proof. The printer will print the same subject in different colors combination for the artist to select the one he want for producing the final signed and numbered edition. Some of these trial proof are unique as only one copy was printed with these particular colors. It is in excellent condition, the margin is slightly wavy. About the artist: Ting Shao Kuang, a prominent contemporary Chinese painter in America, has produced works characterized by a combination of traditional Chinese painting techniques and the more expressive Western art forms. He has created a unique style that does not belong exclusively to the East or the West, but to the world. Ting Shao Kuang was born in Chenggu, a village located in the Northern province of Shanxi, China in 1939. The year Ting was born, this area, which once was the center of an advanced civilization, was reeling from the ravages of the Sino-Japanese war. But as the war progressed, Ting's father, a Kuomintang official in Beijing, helped rally the Nationalist forces, and the Japanese Imperial Army was eventually defeated. Mao Zedong's People's Liberation Army took over the government of China only two years after the war, forcing Ting's parents to flee to Taiwan. They left Ting in Beijing with his grandparents who were suffering immensely from the poverty that was inflicted upon them by the Government. In order to survive his loneliness and alienation, Ting turned to painting for solace. By age 11, he was painting every day, using cooking oil as a medium for his pigment. Despite his lack of adequate supplies, he evidenced such remarkable talent that, in 1954, he was given the opportunity to attend the prestigious high school affiliated with the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. In 1957, Ting was accepted at Beijing's Central Academy of Arts and Crafts. Although he was taught "Socialist Realism" in his classes, it was during this time that he discovered the works of Picasso, Matisse and Modigliani. The paintings of these artists inspired him to experiment with new themes and techniques. The summer before he began his senior year, Ting went to the Yellow River to paint the birthplace ofChinese civilization. However, when he arrived he found such misery and poverty, due to the disastrous Great Leap Forward, that he returned to Beijing. Because of the impact his trip had on him, he committed himself to painting only the beautiful side of life. After graduating in 1962 with highest honors, Ting was signed to teach at the Yunnan Art Institute in Kunming. Here he painted during the night in an abstract style that was considered unacceptable by the government. This forced him to burn his paintings each morning to avoid being caught by the authorities. Although the people in Kunming had more freedom than Ting had ever known, his modernistic views still managed to come to the attention of the authorities. As a result, in 1967, he was suspended from his job and, when rumors of his impending imprisonment reached Kunming, he escaped into northern China. He found sanctuary in the Buddhist monasteries of Gansu where he studied the ancient sculptures they contained. Later he went to Dunhuang , an ancient caravan stop of the Silk Route from 4th to the 13th century, where he studied the paintings preserved on the walls and ceilings of over four hundred caves. In 1968, Ting felt it was safe to return to Kunming even though it was mandatory to attend political meetings and it was still impossible for him to teach. By that time, however, there were four other artists there who shared his artistic views. After Mao died in 1976 and art classes finally resumed, the friendship that began in secret slowly began to surface. In 1979, these artists formed the Yunnan Shen She Art Association and, three years later, they exhibited at the First International Art Show in Hong Kong. In the same year, Ting was commissioned to paint a mural in the Great Hall of the People, which was an extraordinary honor for any artist, especially one who was considered to be an outsider, philosophically. 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 has become a force in the international art world. 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"
  • Creator:
    Ting Shao Kuang (1933, Chinese)
  • Creation Year:
    1996
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 30.5 in (77.47 cm)Width: 29.25 in (74.3 cm)Depth: 0.01 in (0.26 mm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Condition:
  • Gallery Location:
    San Francisco, CA
  • Reference Number:
    Seller: tin/sha/kua/021stDibs: LU666314015522
More From This SellerView All
  • Platform
    Located in San Francisco, CA
    This artwork titled "Platform" 1963 is an original silkscreen by American artist Kenneth William Auvil, 1925-1999. It is signed, dated, titled and numbered 9/27 in pencil by the artist. The image size is 17 x 11.25 inches, framed size is 23.5 x 17.65 inches. Custom framed in a bronze color metal frame. It is in good condition, paper is slightly toned by age. About the artist: Educational Background University of Washington, 1953 MFA Art University of Washington, 1949 BA Art Teaching Experience San Jose State University, 1956 -1988 Selected Publications Serigraphy: Silk Screen Techniques for the Artist, Prentice‑Hall, 1965‑1996. Activities: Learning to Use the Macintosh Computer...
    Category

    Mid-20th Century American Modern More Prints

    Materials

    Screen

  • La Fete a Honfleur
    By Fanch (Francois Ledan)
    Located in San Francisco, CA
    This artwork, "La Fete a Honfleur" c.1980 is a original colors serigraph on Wove paper by French artist (Fanch) Francois Ledan, born 1949. it is hand signed an...
    Category

    Late 20th Century Modern Landscape Prints

    Materials

    Screen

  • Left Bank Cafe, Paris
    By LeRoy Neiman
    Located in San Francisco, CA
    This artwork titled "Left Bank Cafe, Paris" 1987 is an original color serigraph by noted American artist LeRoy Neiman, 1921-2012. It is hand signed and numbered H.C 166/175 in pencil by the artist. The image size is 26 x 38 inches, sheet size is 32.25 x 44 inches. With the blind stamp of the printer Styria Studio at the lower left corner margin. It is in excellent condition, two small pieces of hanging tape remain on the back. About the artist: Mr. Neiman's kinetic, quickly executed paintings and drawings, many of them published in Playboy, offered his fans gaudily colored visual reports on heavyweight boxing matches, Super Bowl games and Olympic contests, as well as social panoramas like the horse races at Deauville, France, and the Cannes Film Festival. Quite consciously, he cast himself in the mold of French Impressionists like Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir and Degas, chroniclers of public life who found rich social material at racetracks, dance halls and cafes. Mr. Neiman often painted or sketched on live television. With the camera recording his progress at the sketchpad or easel, he interpreted the drama of Olympic Games and Super Bowls for an audience of millions. When Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky faced off in Reykjavik, Iceland, to decide the world chess championship, Mr. Neiman was there, sketching. He was on hand to capture Federico Fellini directing "8 ½" and the Kirov Ballet performing in the Soviet Union. In popularity, Mr. Neiman rivaled American favorites like Norman Rockwell, Grandma Moses and Andrew Wyeth. A prolific one-man industry, he generated hundreds of paintings, drawings, watercolors, limited-edition serigraph prints and coffee-table books yearly, earning gross annual revenue in the tens of millions of dollars. Although he exhibited constantly and his work was included in the collections of dozens of museums around the world, critical respect eluded him. Mainstream art critics either ignored him completely or, if forced to consider his work, dismissed it with contempt as garish and superficial — magazine illustration with pretensions. Mr. Neiman professed not to care. Maybe the critics are right," he told American Artist magazine in 1995. "But what am I supposed to do about it — stop painting, change my work completely? I go back into the studio, and there I am at the easel again. I enjoy what I'm doing and feel good working. Other thoughts are just crowded out." His image suggested an artist well beyond the reach of criticism. A dandy and bon vivant, he cut an arresting figure with his luxuriant ear-to-ear mustache, white suits, flashy hats and Cuban cigars. "He quite intentionally invented himself as a flamboyant artist not unlike Salvador Dalí, in much the same way that I became Mr. Playboy in the late '50s," Hugh Hefner told Cigar Aficionado magazine in 1995. LeRoy Runquist was born on June 8, 1921, in St. Paul. His father, a railroad worker, deserted the family when LeRoy was quite young, and the boy took the surname of his stepfather. He showed a flair for art at an early age. While attending a local Roman Catholic school, he impressed schoolmates by drawing ink tattoos on their arms during recess. As a teenager, he earned money doing illustrations for local grocery stores. "I'd sketch a turkey, a cow, a fish, with the prices," he told Cigar Aficionado. "And then I had the good sense to draw the guy who owned the store. This gave me tremendous power as a kid." After being drafted into the Army in 1942, he served as a cook in the European theater but in his spare time painted risqué murals on the walls of kitchens and mess halls. The Army's Special Services Division, recognizing his talent, put him to work painting stage sets for Red Cross shows when he was stationed in Germany after the war. On leaving the military, he studied briefly at the St. Paul School of Art (now the Minnesota Museum of American Art) before enrolling in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where, after four years of study, he taught figure drawing and fashion illustration throughout the 1950s. When the janitor of the apartment building next door to his threw out half-empty cans of enamel house paint, Mr. Neiman found his métier. Experimenting with the new medium, he embraced a rapid style of applying paint to canvas imposed by the free-flowing quality of the house paint. While doing freelance fashion illustration for the Carson Pirie Scott department store in Chicago in the early 1950s, he became friendly with Mr. Hefner, a copywriter there who was on the verge of publishing the first issue of a men's magazine. In 1954, after five issues of Playboy had appeared, Mr. Neiman ran into Mr. Hefner and invited him to his apartment to see his paintings of boxers, strip clubs and restaurants. Mr. Hefner, impressed, showed the work to Playboy's art director, Art Paul, who commissioned an illustration for "Black Country," a story by Charles Beaumont about a jazz musician. Thus began a relationship that endured for more than half a century and established Mr. Neiman's reputation. In 1955, when Mr. Hefner decided that the party-jokes page needed visual interest, Mr. Neiman came up with the Femlin, a curvaceous brunette who cavorted across the page in thigh-high stockings, high-heeled shoes, opera gloves and nothing else. She appeared in every issue of the magazine thereafter. Three years later, Mr. Neiman devised a running feature, "Man at His Leisure." For the next 15 years, he went on assignment to glamour spots around the world, sending back visual reports on subjects as varied as the races at Royal Ascot, the dining room of the Tour d'Argent in Paris, the nude beaches of the Dalmatian coast, the running of the bulls at Pamplona and Carnaby Street in swinging London. He later produced more than 100 paintings and 2 murals for 18 of the Playboy clubs that opened around the world. "Playboy made the good life a reality for me and made it the subject matter of my paintings — not affluence and luxury as such, but joie de vivre itself," Mr. Neiman told V.I.P. magazine in 1962. Working in the same copywriting department at Carson Pirie Scott as Mr. Hefner was Janet Byrne, a student at the Art Institute. She and Mr. Neiman married in 1957. She survives him. A prolific artist, he generated dozens of paintings each year that routinely commanded five-figure prices. When Christie's auctioned off the Playboy archives in 2003, his 1969 painting Man at His Leisure: Le Mans sold for $107,550. Sales of the signed, limited-edition print versions of his paintings, published in editions of 250 to 500, became a lucrative business in itself after Knoedler Publishing, a wholesale operation, was created in 1975 to publish and distribute his serigraphs, etchings, books and posters. Mr. Neiman's most famous images came from the world of sports. His long association with the Olympics began with the Winter Games in Squaw Valley in 1960, and he went on to cover the games, on live television, in Munich in 1972, Montreal in 1976, Lake Placid in 1980, and Sarajevo and Los Angeles in 1984, using watercolor, ink or felt-tip marker to produce images with the dispatch of a courtroom sketch artist. At the 1978 and 1979 Super Bowls, he used a computerized electronic pen to portray the action for CBS. Although he was best known for scenes filled with people and incident, he also painted many portraits. Athletes predominated, with Muhammad Ali and Joe Namath among his more famous subjects, but he also painted Leonard Bernstein, the ballet dancer Suzanne Farrell...
    Category

    21st Century and Contemporary American Modern Figurative Prints

    Materials

    Screen

  • Untitled, Two Women Sitting
    By Isaac Maimon
    Located in San Francisco, CA
    This artwork "Untitled, Two Women Sitting" is an original color serigraph on paper by noted Israeli artist Isaac Maimon, b.1955. It hand signed and numbered XXVI/CXXV in pencil by t...
    Category

    Late 20th Century Modern Figurative Prints

    Materials

    Screen

  • Baden Baden, Casino
    By LeRoy Neiman
    Located in San Francisco, CA
    This artwork titled "Baden Baden, Casino" 1988 is an original color serigraph by noted American artist LeRoy Neiman, 1921-2012. It is hand signed and numbered 261/375 in pencil by the artist. The image size is 36 x 42 inches, sheet size is 42 x 48 inches. With the blind stamp of the printer Styria Studio at the lower left corner margin. It is in excellent condition, three small pieces of hanging tape remain on the back. About the artist: Mr. Neiman's kinetic, quickly executed paintings and drawings, many of them published in Playboy, offered his fans gaudily colored visual reports on heavyweight boxing matches, Super Bowl games and Olympic contests, as well as social panoramas like the horse races at Deauville, France, and the Cannes Film Festival. Quite consciously, he cast himself in the mold of French Impressionists like Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir and Degas, chroniclers of public life who found rich social material at racetracks, dance halls and cafes. Mr. Neiman often painted or sketched on live television. With the camera recording his progress at the sketchpad or easel, he interpreted the drama of Olympic Games and Super Bowls for an audience of millions. When Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky faced off in Reykjavik, Iceland, to decide the world chess championship, Mr. Neiman was there, sketching. He was on hand to capture Federico Fellini directing "8 ½" and the Kirov Ballet performing in the Soviet Union. In popularity, Mr. Neiman rivaled American favorites like Norman Rockwell, Grandma Moses and Andrew Wyeth. A prolific one-man industry, he generated hundreds of paintings, drawings, watercolors, limited-edition serigraph prints and coffee-table books yearly, earning gross annual revenue in the tens of millions of dollars. Although he exhibited constantly and his work was included in the collections of dozens of museums around the world, critical respect eluded him. Mainstream art critics either ignored him completely or, if forced to consider his work, dismissed it with contempt as garish and superficial — magazine illustration with pretensions. Mr. Neiman professed not to care. Maybe the critics are right," he told American Artist magazine in 1995. "But what am I supposed to do about it — stop painting, change my work completely? I go back into the studio, and there I am at the easel again. I enjoy what I'm doing and feel good working. Other thoughts are just crowded out." His image suggested an artist well beyond the reach of criticism. A dandy and bon vivant, he cut an arresting figure with his luxuriant ear-to-ear mustache, white suits, flashy hats and Cuban cigars. "He quite intentionally invented himself as a flamboyant artist not unlike Salvador Dalí, in much the same way that I became Mr. Playboy in the late '50s," Hugh Hefner told Cigar Aficionado magazine in 1995. LeRoy Runquist was born on June 8, 1921, in St. Paul. His father, a railroad worker, deserted the family when LeRoy was quite young, and the boy took the surname of his stepfather. He showed a flair for art at an early age. While attending a local Roman Catholic school, he impressed schoolmates by drawing ink tattoos on their arms during recess. As a teenager, he earned money doing illustrations for local grocery stores. "I'd sketch a turkey, a cow, a fish, with the prices," he told Cigar Aficionado. "And then I had the good sense to draw the guy who owned the store. This gave me tremendous power as a kid." After being drafted into the Army in 1942, he served as a cook in the European theater but in his spare time painted risqué murals on the walls of kitchens and mess halls. The Army's Special Services Division, recognizing his talent, put him to work painting stage sets for Red Cross shows when he was stationed in Germany after the war. On leaving the military, he studied briefly at the St. Paul School of Art (now the Minnesota Museum of American Art) before enrolling in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where, after four years of study, he taught figure drawing and fashion illustration throughout the 1950s. When the janitor of the apartment building next door to his threw out half-empty cans of enamel house paint, Mr. Neiman found his métier. Experimenting with the new medium, he embraced a rapid style of applying paint to canvas imposed by the free-flowing quality of the house paint. While doing freelance fashion illustration for the Carson Pirie Scott department store in Chicago in the early 1950s, he became friendly with Mr. Hefner, a copywriter there who was on the verge of publishing the first issue of a men's magazine. In 1954, after five issues of Playboy had appeared, Mr. Neiman ran into Mr. Hefner and invited him to his apartment to see his paintings of boxers, strip clubs and restaurants. Mr. Hefner, impressed, showed the work to Playboy's art director, Art Paul, who commissioned an illustration for "Black Country," a story by Charles Beaumont about a jazz musician. Thus began a relationship that endured for more than half a century and established Mr. Neiman's reputation. In 1955, when Mr. Hefner decided that the party-jokes page needed visual interest, Mr. Neiman came up with the Femlin, a curvaceous brunette who cavorted across the page in thigh-high stockings, high-heeled shoes, opera gloves and nothing else. She appeared in every issue of the magazine thereafter. Three years later, Mr. Neiman devised a running feature, "Man at His Leisure." For the next 15 years, he went on assignment to glamour spots around the world, sending back visual reports on subjects as varied as the races at Royal Ascot, the dining room of the Tour d'Argent in Paris, the nude beaches of the Dalmatian coast, the running of the bulls at Pamplona and Carnaby Street in swinging London. He later produced more than 100 paintings and 2 murals for 18 of the Playboy clubs that opened around the world. "Playboy made the good life a reality for me and made it the subject matter of my paintings — not affluence and luxury as such, but joie de vivre itself," Mr. Neiman told V.I.P. magazine in 1962. Working in the same copywriting department at Carson Pirie Scott as Mr. Hefner was Janet Byrne, a student at the Art Institute. She and Mr. Neiman married in 1957. She survives him. A prolific artist, he generated dozens of paintings each year that routinely commanded five-figure prices. When Christie's auctioned off the Playboy archives in 2003, his 1969 painting Man at His Leisure: Le Mans sold for $107,550. Sales of the signed, limited-edition print versions of his paintings, published in editions of 250 to 500, became a lucrative business in itself after Knoedler Publishing, a wholesale operation, was created in 1975 to publish and distribute his serigraphs, etchings, books and posters. Mr. Neiman's most famous images came from the world of sports. His long association with the Olympics began with the Winter Games in Squaw Valley in 1960, and he went on to cover the games, on live television, in Munich in 1972, Montreal in 1976, Lake Placid in 1980, and Sarajevo and Los Angeles in 1984, using watercolor, ink or felt-tip marker to produce images with the dispatch of a courtroom sketch artist. At the 1978 and 1979 Super Bowls, he used a computerized electronic pen to portray the action for CBS. Although he was best known for scenes filled with people and incident, he also painted many portraits. Athletes predominated, with Muhammad Ali and Joe Namath among his more famous subjects, but he also painted Leonard Bernstein, the ballet dancer Suzanne Farrell...
    Category

    21st Century and Contemporary American Modern Figurative Prints

    Materials

    Screen

  • Orchid
    By Jack Brusca
    Located in San Francisco, CA
    This artwork titled 'Orchid" 1979 is an original color silkscreen on paper by American artist Jack Brusca, 1939-1993. it is hand signed, dated and numbered 6/200 in pencil by the art...
    Category

    Late 20th Century American Modern Figurative Prints

    Materials

    Screen

You May Also Like

Recently Viewed

View All