Ju Ming Sculpture

Here is a bright, surreal post to brighten up your day and mine. More retrospective memories of China. I was really struggling in Beijing until I decided to take a day to myself and make the trip to the China Modern Art Gallery. It offered me my first real reason to love China. In the Modern Art gallery you have to navigate your way through countless displays of traditional-style Chinese painting but there are really exciting things to be discovered too. Here are the sculptures of Taiwanese artist, Ju Ming.

Ju Ming painting sculpture for the Living World Series

Mostly carving in wood, Ming's sculptures can appear at first glance to be western-style pieces of garden furniture, the kind of thing you might find in a children's playground. But his sculptures should neither be dismissed nor ignored. Ju Ming's sculptures had an incredible and surprising emotional intensity for me.

Initially I did dismiss them but they commanded my attention and I realised that they transcended the possibilities of the medium. Sculpted in wood, stainless steel and polystyrene these figures should have remained firmly in the realm of unreality. But when I looked at them through my camera lens I realised how human they were. Ming's Living World Series seemed to be an anthropological storybook of human life. Polystyrene communicated anger, pain, frustration, illuminated in dark and light. Human expression became living theatre before my eyes- Kaleidoscopic Humanity.

Hi stainless steel synchronised swimmers had incredible lyrical fluidity and grace of movement.

"I do not imbue my sculpture with any one particular story; rather, interpretation is solely the domain of the viewer. I neither intend to tell a story while sculpting, nor do I go back and write a story to fit the final product. "

The whole thing astounded me, so here are some images for you:

'The abstract technique is a synthetic one, both concrete and abstract, trying to lead the viewers into a charming realm. The journey brings them into contact with snow mountains, oceans, cliffs, sands, deep valleys, remote antiquity, clouds, and springs. More importantly, the vastness, undulation and surge of the picture satisfy viewers with a sense of majesty.'

Doesn't Chinese just sound amazing in translation?

For more information about Ju Ming, take a look at this article; http://www.thingsasian.com/stories-photos/2688