Wang Jianan

Wang Jianan was born in Heilongjiang Province in 1955 and was one of a handful of brilliant students admitted in 1978 to the famous and newly reopened Central Academy of Fine Arts of China in Beijing. In 1983 he set up the Zhong Li art studio, which was the first independent and professional art studio of its kind in China after the Cultural Revolution. Many students of Wang's generation were primarily interested in Western painting to which they now had limited access. But Wang, having had little chance to study the Chinese classics as an adolescent, wanted to focus on traditional painting because, as he has written, "I wanted to know who I was, where I came from, and, indeed, where I was going". His works have been collected by many notable institutions including the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, as well as the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University and the Central Academy of Fine Arts of China in Beijing.