Guojian Yuan's Profile

From: Flushing, NY
Joined: November 13, 2007
http://geocities.com/guojianlili/shanghaigallery.html

About binghamtonyoung:

Yuan Guojian was born in 1953, Shanghai, China. He studied in the Fine Arts Department of Anhui Normal University during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Although confined by an institution which strictly abided by Social-Realist ideology, Yuan stood out as a non-conformist ever since the early stages of his career. As a result, censorship and criticism were forced upon him regularly. However, staying true to his philosophy that a true artist only follows his own instinctual beliefs, he continued his artistic journey in his own way. The creative restrictions he experienced at the university led him to leave school in his last year of study to return home and establish an individual fine arts studio to teach painting. Yuan's return to Shanghai coincided with the rise of Deng Xiao Ping, who reduced some of the severe cultural and intellectual restrictions of Mao's era. During the 80's, Yuan actively participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, solons, and national arts competitions. In 1986, he and some of his fellow artists founded the Red-Yellow-Blue Painting Association in Shanghai, whose sole objective lays in the revitalization of Chinese art. He also held exhibitions abroad such as West Germany, the United States, and South Korea.

Yuan stood out as an artist who inherited the Chinese tradition and also integrated elements of contemporary Western art, thereby distinguishes himself as a prominent representative of the New Wave of contemporary Chinese painters since post-Cultural Revolution era. Ever since the early 1980's, Yuan has established his reputation in Shanghai and attracted attention from foreign visitors, among them personnel from foreign embassies and consulates. The friendships he formed with some of these prominent figures at the time gradually turned precarious, which resulted in his name being blacklisted by the Chinese communist government. Yuan was then interrogated and ordered to check in with the Chinese government on a regular basis for reasons kept unknown to him. As a result, Yuan made a decision to leave China to evade further harassment from the government and immigrated with his family to the United States in 1994. Today he lives and works in New York and continues to express his creativity in art.