Fang Shujiu

Fang Shujiu was born in July 1943 in Huainan, Anhui Province, China. He studied in Nanjing as a teenager, and entered the art department of Nanjing Art Institute in 1960; in 1963, he entered the Department of Plastic Art of Wuxi Light Industry University (now Jiangnan University); in 1967, he graduated from the university during the Cultural Revolution and was assigned to a factory to receive re-education of the working class as the head of the design office, engaged in foreign trade art design and art creation; in 1986, he was transferred to Suzhou City Construction Environmental Protection College (now Suzhou University of Science and Technology) as In 1994, he was invited to Thailand and Malaysia in Southeast Asia to hold a successful solo exhibition; at the end of 1996, he was invited to the United States and Canada to hold exhibitions and lectures, and to study at Arcadia College of Fine Arts in the United States, and at the same time, he was appointed as a professor of art at Liqi University of Science and Technology in the United States and as an honorary researcher at the Canadian Cultural Renewal Research Center (Institute). In May 2021, he was appointed as a Chinese State Guest Artist and National Artist and was also appointed as a visiting professor at the Academy of Fine Arts of Tsinghua University.
Now living in New York, he is the president of the Nine Dragons Art Institute, the director of the East-West Art Center and the executive chairman of the International Federation of Expatriate Culture and Art, the president of the Daifengtang Art Research Association, the academician of the Asian Art Institute, the honorary president of the Chinese Painting Society (USA), the vice president of the New York Poetry, Painting and Chess Association and the first president and artistic director of the Painting and Calligraphy Institute.
His works have been collected by the United Nations, former U.S. President Reagan, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the King of Thailand, and other political and business leaders, as well as universities and museums in many countries. He has been awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award and the Jiezuo Artist Award in the U.S. and has been listed in the “Who’s Who Among Chinese” and “Who’s Who in the World”; in Beijing, he received the “Artistic Achievement Award” and was awarded the He was also awarded the “Artistic Achievement Award” in Beijing and was honored as the “2018 Most Influential People’s Artist”. He has been invited to hold many exhibitions at the United Nations, and his works have been exhibited at art fairs in more than 20 countries around the world. He has inherited and carried forward the art style of Dafengtang, where his predecessors Zhang Shanzhuang and Zhang Daqian “raised tigers and painted them, and sent them to express their feelings”. Figure] group painting, [Three Kingdoms Five Tiger Generals], [Water Margin 108 Generals] tiger painting scroll, these are the only seen in history. He also “painted horses and expressed his feelings through horses” and his 100 horses were selected to be funded by the government to create the first monument gallery of 100 horses in China – Fang Shujiu’s 100 horses monument, which filled a gap in art history. His panda paintings were selected for the first set of postcards and first-day covers in the United States for global distribution. He is capable of painting both Chinese and Western landscapes, flowers, birds, and figures, but he specializes in many animal paintings such as tigers, horses, lions, pandas, and zodiac signs, which have been published and distributed in over a million copies in China and abroad. In the world of painting, his works are known as “The King of Tigers, the Treasure of China”.
　　The most important feature of his art is that he takes the spirit of traditional Chinese art as the base and appropriately absorbs some features of Western art to express his feelings through objects. His works are full of human feelings and at the same time reflect profound ideology and characteristics of the times, thus forming his grounded and unique art style of overseas Chinese.
He is also a sculptor and senior designer. He has designed environmental art for many city centers and created more than ten large urban sculptures, and was invited by the state to sculpt giant marble reliefs for each side of a museum gate.
　　His multifaceted artistic achievements were highly recognized by experts and scholars at the International Symposium on the Works of Fang Shujiu held at Columbia University in the United States.
　　He is a rare artist with a conscience and a sense of social responsibility. His poems and paintings, such as “Two Eggs for a Pound of Food Stamps”, which were criticized during the Cultural Revolution, have been praised as “great realist works” by domestic and foreign critics, and have been recorded in the history of literature. The international symposium of his works has also had a far-reaching impact through the global connection with Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, etc., more than 60 universities in the world.