Sui Jianguo is a contemporary Chinese artist born in 1956 in Qingdao, China. His parents were factory workers, and he did little work from an early age due to the workload imposed by the Mao Zedong regime. When Sui was 10 years old, schools were closed during the Cultural Revolution and he worked as a laborer in a factory with his parents. In an interview on the subject, he said, “I was transfixed by the era of Mao worship, when Mao was practically a god in the country.” Sui broke his arm at the age of 18 and was unable to work in a factory, which inspired him to start painting. Soon, with his father’s permission and guidance, he began studying painting at night. At the time, realism was an accepted art style, and its mission was to portray Maoist ideals in a romantic and positive light. When he returned to the factory, he began painting propaganda posters for Mao Zedong. After Mao Zedong’s death, he completed his study of traditional Chinese landscape painting in 1976. Sui then moved to Jinan and then to Shandong, where he majored in sculpture. A few years later, he earned a master’s degree in fine arts from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. He said his inspiration for creating his sculptures came from being told that he was “skillful with his hands” while working in a factory. In addition to traveling around the world and exhibiting his art, he also worked as a visiting professor and lecturer at several universities outside China.
www.ftn-books.com has the Fondation Maeght publication on 3 sculptures in which Jianguo features asone off the selected sculptors
