Shao Fang (1918-), female, is a famous Chinese-American painter, ceramicist and architect. Originally from Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, she now lives in the United States.
Chinese Name: Shao Fang
Nationality: Chinese
Ethnicity: Han
Birthplace: Changzhou, Jiangsu Province
Date of Birth: 1918
Occupation: Chinese Painter, Potter, Architect
Graduated from West Virginia University
Major Achievements: First female painter to go to Dunhuang and copy the murals. Female Painter
Representative Works: Changes in the Western Pure Land
Basic Information
Shao Fang (1918-), female, is a renowned Chinese-American Chinese painter, ceramicist, and architect. Originally from Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, she now lives in the United States. She is the disciple of Chinese painting master Chen Shaomei, the first female painter who went to Dunhuang to copy murals, she is also the footsteps of the famous American architect Wright (Frank Lloyd Wright: 1867-1959), and she is also the nephew's great-grandson's daughter-in-law of Sheng Xuanyuanhuai, the first generation of the famous industrialist of the Qing Dynasty, and the crown prince's junior minister of the late Qing Dynasty. University of West Virginia with an honorary doctorate in humanities and arts.
Biography
Born in 1918 in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, Shao Fang's ancestors were a family of traditional Chinese medicine practitioners in Changzhou. Shao Fang was a naturalist by nature, and as a child she loved to paint, her family predicted that she would grow up to become a practicing artist. As expected, she became a disciple of the "child prodigy" painter Chen Shaomei, and served as his assistant teacher, jokingly referred to as "Big Brother" by her fellow artists. Gao Jiqian recalls that one year when Shao Fang went back to China to visit her family and friends, she stopped by Rongbaozhai in Beijing to look at paintings and contemplated in front of Chen Shaomei's works. When a clerk approached her, she asked if the master had any descendants, and the clerk said he only knew of one disciple in the United States, but it was hard to say whether he was still alive! She laughed and said, my daughter is exactly.
In the latter part of the war, she served as a researcher at the Dunhuang Art Institute, the director of which was Chang Shuhong, a painter who stayed in France and was known as the "patron saint of Dunhuang."
In 1944, she went to Dunhuang to copy the murals, along with Chang Shuhong, Dong Xiwen, Zhang Daqian, Li Yu and Su Yinghui, and was said to have been the first woman to copy Dunhuang murals.
The desert, Dunhuang, the Cave of a Thousand Buddhas, and the Crescent Springs, a tourist attraction that is famous all over the world today, was an out-of-the-way wilderness with closed transportation and few people in the anti-Japanese war years. Shao Fang, who regarded art as his life, kept company with the murals of Dunhuang, and was mesmerized by the caves showing the flying skies, which he copied with his head.
Shao Fang copied a painting of the Western Pure Land with 120 bodhisattvas, which took two months to complete. This work, which Zhang Daqian wanted to paint but could not, was praised by Chang Shuhong, the director of the institute, and by all his colleagues, and is still fresh in the memory of Li Yu, a professor at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang, 50 years later.
On October 17, 1940, Shao Fang married Sheng Shengbao, the nephew and great-grandson of Sheng Xuanhuai, a famous industrialist of the first generation of the late Qing Dynasty, in Tianjin. After the marriage, as Sheng Shengbao was an engineer for the Ganxin Highway, Shao Fang also accompanied her husband on an expedition to Jiuquan, where she spent her days in the harsh environment of yellow sand.
After the victory in the war, Shao Fang gradually made her way into the art world and rose to prominence. Before leaving China, Shao Fang held an exhibition in Nanjing, where political celebrities Zhu Jiahua and Zhang Daofan attended the opening ceremony. The Dunhuang murals of ladies she copied accompanied her for dozens of summers in a foreign country.
At that time, Shao Fang was considered to be a modern woman on the cutting edge of the times, in an era of feudalism and isolation. She loved sports, and in 1936 she was selected to play on the Hebei women's softball team in the Sixth National Games. She was born with a good singing voice and studied at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music in the U.S. "At that time, I wanted to be both a painter and a singer," she said.
Shao Fang had a strong reputation as a famous girl. Li found four photographs of Shao Fang in the 1934, 1935 and 1936 issues of Beiyang Pictorial in Tianjin, taken when she was between 16 and 18 years old. One of the photographs, which appeared in Beiyang Pictorial in 1936, was of Shao leaning on a balustrade, a beautiful woman.
In 1947, the Taliesin School, founded by American architect Wright, was recruiting students from all over the world, with only one place available in China. Wright watched Shao Fang's paintings, especially after copying the works of Dunhuang, gladly accepted, 29-year-old Shao Fang was able to study in the United States.
Wright is recognized as one of the world's great architects, with masterpieces such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Fallingwater Village in Pennsylvania, and the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, which was left standing after the 1923 earthquake that devastated the city. His theories of "Prairie Style" and "Organic Architecture" have influenced generations. After his death, more than 50 buildings designed by him in the United States have been converted into Wright Memorials.
Overseas life
The year after Shao Fang came to the United States, Sheng Shengbao accepted Wright's invitation to come to the United States and teach at the Department of Architecture at Ohio University. He had the opportunity to pursue a doctoral degree at Harvard University, but eventually gave it up in favor of a career in architecture.
After coming to the United States, Mr. and Mrs. Sheng were helped by Mr. and Mrs. Fei Zhengqing and Fei Weimei to enter mainstream American society. Mr. and Mrs. Fei Zhengqing and Shao Fang met in Chongqing in 1946, befriended each other in Nanjing, and reunited in the U.S. Their friendship was extraordinary.
In 1953, Sheng and Shao moved south from Rhode Island to work for American Cyanamid on the west side of the Ohio River, and in 1957 Sheng jumped to Marietta Cement Company. He was above average in both his civil engineering specialty and his philosophical thinking. He was respected and honored both at Taliesin and in Virginia.
In 1955, Mr. and Mrs. Sheng, in an effort to settle down, took a unique look at a scenic, east-facing hillside wooded lot on the east side of the Ohio River in the town of Williamsport, West Virginia, and decided to build their dream.
Sheng Shengbao, a civil engineer, built the home he envisioned to fulfill an early dream. As early as 1941, when Sheng Shengbao was still building the Yunnan-Burma Road, he had this dream. He wrote to Shao Fang, "I always want to build a few houses of my own. The west side of the city of Kunming, that is, in the direction of the western mountains, the terrain is indeed better than the east, feng shui is also good, because making a house is always built with the back of the mountains, facing the east, the sun comes to the house early in the morning, which is to make us get up early, everything has vitality.
A number of years later, Sheng Shengbao in the United States, a dream come true, they use the spare time for holidays, husband and wife to build their own house, from design to construction, a single-handedly, not only to realize the dream of the year, but also to the Wright School of Architecture to hand over a beautiful report card.
In order to return to nature, the building materials were made of raw wood and original colors, with as little steel and cement as possible, without dazzling decorations, and built with one piece of wood and one piece of stone, resulting in a three-storey glass house with a floor area of about 350 square meters, which was a sensation for hundreds of miles when it was inaugurated in 1955.
Today, a sawmill still stands in the Yiran Pavilion as a testament to that history.
Shengshengbao and his wife believe that "a good building beautifies the environment as well as the life". This all-wooden house, with full glass on the east wall and half glass on the west wall, is actually a building styled according to Wright's concepts of "Prairie Architecture" and "Organic Architecture," and harmonizes with its surroundings, with a hillside to the east, and a lawn surrounded by clumps of trees to the west, with grass as green as grass. With the full-screen glass on the east wall, the sunlight can fully penetrate, and you can enjoy a panoramic view of the green water and mountains from the interior.
From the bottom of the mountain, the glass house stands on the hillside, the house is like a wing, like the sky, extraordinary momentum. Therefore, it is named Winged Pavilion Studio after Ouyang Xiu's "Records of the Drunken Master's Pavilion", which alludes to the fact that "there are pavilions that are winged". "Winged Pavilion, with its back to the mountain and its face to the east, is Sheng Sheng Pao's way of keeping the "vitality" and beauty "as the convergence of God and nature in the related fields" forever.
While the two small towns are divided by the Ohio River and belong to two states, the two towns are like one **** in terms of the psychological space of their residents because of the two large highway bridges over the river that allow them to look at each other from a distance.
The Marietta Daily Journal featured a front-page story about the glass house and its owner in the upper left-hand corner of its front page, headlined "The Very Capable and Beautiful Mrs. Sheng," and featuring a half-length photo of Shao Fang in a black cheongsam, a typical Chinese lady. The photo caption reads "protégéofFamedArchitectFrankLloydwright". Mr. and Mrs. Sheng and their glass house became the focus of mega-news and media interviews spread by word of mouth by local residents.
Sheng Shaofang went on to hold local exhibitions. Her style of painting is so distinctive and her artistic expression so similar to Picasso's that some have called her "China's female Picasso". She is easy-going and likes to make friends. Her charisma attracts the whole community and she is widely respected and loved by the local mainstream society. She was regarded as the "mythical angel of the East", an impression Shao Fang left on local residents more than 50 years ago!
In November 2000, her city once again held a solo exhibition of her photography, painting, weaving, ceramics and jewelry, which was featured on the front page of the local mainstream newspaper.
It's no wonder why she receives mail without a full address. A friend who visited her recalled getting lost in Williamstown and asking for directions at a local gas station, and when he mentioned the glass house, someone immediately gave him directions. It's clear that the name is true.
In Williamstown, a river away from the Ohio River on the west side of Marietta (Marietta), Sheng Shaofang also has a condominium building overlooking the river. Li Changyu, a visiting scholar at Ohio University and a teacher at Shandong University High School, visited both of Shaofang's homes in 2000 and praised them for their "good feng shui.
Shao Fang said proudly, her two homes respectively on the east and west banks of the Ohio River, located in two states, one south and one north of the two bridges, like the big weekday, small weekday, because in the middle of the two bridges, the big and small weekday together, forming a cycle of the cycle of the curve, "where to find such feng shui? She attributes her youthfulness and vitality at nearly 90 years of age to good feng shui.
Her apartment home in Marietta is used for entertaining guests and resting, while her glass house, Wing Ran Pavilion, in Williamstown, is used as a home and studio. The house has been weathered for more than 50 years, and it is mottled with the vicissitudes of history.
Shao Fang's recent development
Shao Fang is over 90 years old, but she is just like the horse in the Chinese Zodiac, with a look of "Dragon Horse Spirit and Sea Crane Stance", her ears are not attacked, her back is not hunchbacked, her hands don't shake, her eyes don't blur, and she can thread a needle and thread a needle without wearing glasses. She can thread a needle without wearing glasses. She can hold a pipe and wield a pen, and her pen can move like a dragon and snake. She was a beauty when she was young, and now the "old lady" is still charming and beautiful as before. What is even more rare is that she is healthy, optimistic and open-minded, with a clear mind, flexible movements, and a light gait, without any old age.
In her daily life, she advocates the "Way of Balance", believing that the most important thing is to be balanced above all else. Whether it's walking, eating, living, or being spiritual, she advocates a sense of balance. She says that as one grows old, the stage of life gets narrower and narrower, and it is important to focus on balance. She lives a full and meaningful life every day, and others think that she, a lonely old woman, will live a lonely and boring life, "I have endless things to do every day, how can I have time to be lonely?"
She is a self-made woman who enjoys life in her own artistic world. She describes herself as a workaholic and a night owl, and the later you call her, the easier it is to find her. She has a wide range of friends, and her friends are divided into groups according to their hobbies. There are coffee and chat; there are practicing qigong, taijiquan; there are singing Peking Opera ticket friends; there are cutting art painting friends; there are playing mahjong battle of the four sides of the city's friends, such as sparrow.
She is very frugal and scrimping on food and clothing, and there is no luxury furniture in her home, and she is uncomfortable sitting in a chair that costs 1,000 dollars a piece. She likes to shop the local garage sale (GarageSale), a few cents a piece of clothing she wore with special pleasure. She is very generous to others and has sponsored several mainland Chinese students to complete their studies in the United States. She also gave a lot of money to the Wright Museum.
She said, a person comes to the world naked, prosperity and wealth like a cloud of smoke, life does not bring, death does not take away, only the art of immortality, the spirit of immortality. With her colorful life, she wrote the legend of a "strange woman" with roots in a foreign country. She didn't pursue fine clothes and gourmet food, but her spiritual world was solid and rich.
Shao Fang was a multi-talented artist, practicing painting, knitting, sewing, ceramics, jewelry making and singing Beijing opera. Autumn, winter and spring were the times when Shao Fang made jewelry. She has a full set of tools for processing jewelry, including cutting, slashing, welding, riveting, grinding, forging and casting, as well as a high-temperature firing kiln.
The American dame and noblewoman were keen to wear jewelry that was vintage, exotic and original. Shao Fang with Dunhuang copying accumulated artistic skills, mastered ceramics, artificial agate gemstone kiln technology and metal cutting drilling and grinding process, metal and ceramics as a material, to make simple and elegant, beautiful and generous earrings, necklaces, bracelets and other practical jewelry. She did not repeat the jewelry, a thousand variations, with a strong artistic, although she used materials are not precious metals and gemstones, but because of the hand of a famous artist, the design is unique to meet the aesthetic needs of the American upper class, the price ranges from dozens of dollars to hundreds of dollars.
ChautauquaLake, in western New York State, is a large lake dotted with sailboats, and the town on the lake still stands with imitation kerosene streetlights. The red-brick roads are lined with quaint homes and a rich resort atmosphere. The community's central plaza often hosts handicraft exhibitions. Every summer, Sheng Shaofang drove all the way from West Virginia to Chautauqua for two months to sell her homemade jewelry, her main source of income for more than 40 years. The community is home to many people with a sophisticated, artistic lifestyle and a strong purchasing power. It offers educational, artistic, religious and recreational activities, and often hosts symphonies, operas, plays and dances.
Sheng Shaofang also teaches at a high-class summer school in Chautauque, which is frequented by American celebrities. She taught them Chinese kung fu, qigong, tai chi and ink painting. She's the only Chinese-American teacher at the school, and she's an evergreen.
Li Changyu, who knew her well, noted that Shao Fang lived with a clear purpose, had a sense of accomplishment, pride and excitement in everything she did, was in constant contact with the community, was active in social activities, and was constantly inspired to create and pursue new goals. This is the mystery of her "old age and spring" and what he found in his many interviews with her.
Lee said there was another reason why she was able to "live long in old age": "Sheng Shengbao was always in her heart".
Sheng and his wife, who had loved each other all their lives and regretted not having any children, died suddenly of cardiovascular disease in 1987 at the age of 73. Shao Fang was devastated by the loss of her partner, but she was optimistic and finally got over the pain of losing her wings.
She not only likes to create art, but also likes to do housework, cleaning home cleaning and hygiene never leave it to others, she believes that things should be diligent but not labor, organized and orderly. She says vacuuming and mopping the floor is exercising her body, "How can you pay someone else to do such a good thing." Whenever she has visitors from her hometown, she will catch up with them in her native Changzhou dialect, and her specialty is Changzhou's famous noodle cakes, which will soon be lost!
Sheng Shaofang is also a Peking Opera enthusiast, having studied under Cheng Yanqiu in the Dan role. Her mantra is: one minute on stage, ten years of work off stage. She said that singing Peking Opera is an aerobic exercise, practicing qigong. She entertained herself every day, insisted on hanging her voice for one or two hours, although she entered the age of the dragon's bell, she still sang with a proper accent, clear and bright tone, and her voice and feelings. From the clear and crisp singing voice of the Cheng School of Qing Yi, to the lithe body and dexterous orchid fingers, she was just like a professional Peking Opera actress. One winter, she went to Beijing to visit friends and relatives, stayed at the Beijing Hotel, every morning in the lobby outside the open field hanging voice, alone and singing and doing, attracted a lot of people onlookers, the security guard had to clear the field for her!
She was a good learner, and she lived to learn, and on May 18, 2002, Sheng Shaofang, then 84 years old, was awarded an honorary doctorate in humanities and arts by West Virginia University.