SHAN SHAN SHENG

Shan Shan Sheng grew up in Shanghai during the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. Trained in traditional Chinese ink painting, she came to the United States in 1982 with Matisse and Cezanne high on her list of idols and influences. On a visit back to China, she was inspired by its ancient art. Her recent work, though abstract, continues to pay spiritual homage to her native culture.

Sheng continues an intriguing artistic journey that began in Shanghai and has bloomed in the United States. Whether reinterpreting China's mythic past or exploring the power and potential of Western oil painting, Shan Shan Sheng taps the expressive spirit that links the paintings of the Dunhuang caves and Western modernism. Shan Shan Sheng is "a daughter of her times and the past, of China and the world."

As part of her MFA studies at the University of Massachusetts, she traveled fifteen days across the Gobi Desert to study the Buddhist paintings in the Dunhuang Caves. They have had a profound effect on Sheng's art and her subsequent artistic career illustrates modernism's complex relation to tradition.

"Only in art," says Sheng, "can we create archaic and primitive feeling which people are missing in their daily life. I used to use the figure to express energies. Now I'm using mainly the paint to express energy."

Jeffrey Hantover, writes in The Art of Shan-Shan Sheng, "Sheng succeeds as an artist because her life experiences both in China and in the United States have been the natural incubators of her artistic sensibility. It is not as if she tries to meld disparate elements from the tradition she was born into and the tradition she admired and adopted in the West. Rather, she tapped the expressive heart of both traditions -- the revelatory, not representative -- aspects of both. In the paradox of our age, Shan Shan Sheng paints and does not paint a Chinese picture. Paints and does not paint a Western picture. She creates personal, expressive work that, like herself, is a child of East and West, and like every child, owes a creative debt to both parents."