Biography

American artist Mian Situ was born in 1953 in China’s southeast province of Guongdong (formerly Canton) in the capital city of Guangzhou. At the age of thirteen an artist friend introduced him to art. Situ recalls, “The process [of painting] amazed me and ultimately gave me a channel to release energy.”

As part of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Chairman Mao locked the libraries and destroyed many works of art, and hid information pertaining to other cultures. Situ’s first exposure to European classical art was when a friend with a set of keys to a library opened the door and showed Situ art books from the Italian Renaissance. The next two years Situ spent copying from these books and then, drawing from life, absorbing everything he possibly could about painting.

With his apparent drawing skills, Situ was accepted into the official Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts (GAFA) where he studied from 1972 to 1975, earning a Bachelor’s degree. Classes during these years followed the time-honoured curriculum established in the academies of 19th century Paris and adopted by Russian art academies where traditional realism developed into Socialist Realism, and became the official style of art in China. One of Situ’s professors at GAFA was Guo Shao-gang, a former student of the Russian master Yuri M. Neprintsev. (Guo Shao-gang eventually became Dean of GAFA.)

After completing his Bachelor’s Degree, in keeping with the Cultural Revolution, Situ was then given a mandatory three-year assignment to work in the countryside, in his case as a projectionist showing propaganda films. But in 1978, Situ was invited back to GAFA and with this round of training, with Mao’s death in 1976, and the educational reforms associated with the Revolution abandoned, he was now free to study the work of modern masters and experimented with a variety of painting approaches, settling finally on, as he says simply, “my own style.”

After graduation Mian Situ then taught at the Guangzhou Academy for six years. With this post he took full advantage of his time off, sketching and photographing the inhabitants and daily life of rural Chinese villages in south-western China. He was raised in such a village in Canton.

Situ arrived in Los Angeles in 1987, but soon moved to Canada, first to Vancouver and then to Toronto. From Toronto, he submitted one of his paintings to the 1995 National Juried Exhibition of Oil Painters of America’s and won the $10,000 Best of Show award as well as the People’s Choice Award. Encouraged by his first American success, he decided to return to Los Angeles in 1998 where he currently resides with his wife Helen and daughter Lisa.

 Situ joined the California Art Club in 1999, and the following year his 24″ x 20″ painting, A Quite Day, was selected for the Gold Medal Award by the exhibiting artists at the 90th Annual Gold Medal Juried Exhibition. Also in 2000, Situ won the Judge’s Choice Award and the Purchase Award at the Arts for the Parks competition, and he also received Best of Show at the Carmel Art Festival. In 2001 he was invited to exhibit in the Masters of the American West Fine Art Exhibition and Sale at the Autry National Center in Los Angeles, and the following year, he achieved the remarkable honour of garnering the Museum Purchase Award and the Thomas Moran Memorial Award for Artistic Merit, as well as the Patron’s Choice Award. Situ continues to consistently win major awards.