Tag Archives: Paintings

Ju Ming 朱銘 (b. 1938 – d. 2023)

Ju Ming sculptures have been exhibited internationally, including major exhibitions presented by iPreciation in Singapore.

About Ju Ming

Ju Ming 朱銘 (b. 1938, Taiwan) was born Ju Chuan-Tai to a poor rural family in Miaoli County, Taiwan. After completing his primary school education, he began working at the young age of fifteen. Encouraged by his father, Ju undertook his apprenticeship with famous local craftsman, Lee Chinchuan, and acquired himself the mastery of wood-carving when he was barely twenty. 1968 marked a turning point in Ju Ming’s life as an artist when he became an apprentice of Yuyu Yang, a significant sculptor and pioneer of the modern art movement in Taiwan.

Artistic Influence

His teacher Yuyu Yang broadened Ju Ming’s artistic vision by giving him opportunities to display his talent, as well as providing guidance. He also taught the artist to express himself freely by imparting to him the philosophy of free expression of forms and feelings, and inculcated him with the aesthetic values of simplicity and embracing environmentalism.

The Taichi Series

Ju’s first solo exhibition, arranged by Yang in 1976, raised public attention for his Nativist Series and also paved way for the following Taichi Series. The Taichi Series is an important milestone signifying the maturity of the artist’s sculptural language and aesthetic style, where he found himself being able to wield his exquisite craftsmanship with complete ease and freedom, reaching the stage of forgetting self in the process. In 2002, Ju Ming ceased creating his Taichi Series.

The Living World Series

Prior to his first visit to New York in the early 1980s, Ju Ming started creating wooden sculptures for the Living World Series. He brought some wooden sculptures with him to New York and created more work during his stay in America. These works were subsequently exhibited in a New York art gallery and received an overwhelming success. Since then, Ju’s artistic development on the Living World Series has undergone various stages of development and it has become his central theme of artistic creation alongside his famed Taichi Series; depicting social phenomena with his own language, a way of reconciling the traditional woodcarver’s technique with modern abstraction.

Themes of Everyday Life

Portraying various age groups and walks of life both at work and at play, the Living World Series encapsulates the rich diversity of humanity. While the first Living World Series employed wood figures to depict the nonchalant and mundane lives of trapped individuals in society, the second series is a myriad of anonymous faceless figures with an added touch of humour, made from bronze and foam rubber moulds.

Ju Ming’s sculptures have been widely exhibited internationally, including major exhibitions presented by galleries and museums across Asia, Europe and the United States.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

Selected Group Exhibitions

Awards

  • 2010 | Art Monaco Award for Living World Series
  • 2007 | 18th Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize – Art and Culture Prize, Japan
  • 2004 | 24th National Cultural Award of the Republic of China
  • 2002 | 2nd Enku Grand Award, Gifu, Japan
  • 2000 | 4th Tokyo Creative Award conferred to Ju Ming Museum, Japan
  • 1998 | Fok Ying Tung Award, Hong Kong
  • 1976 | Chinese Literature and Art Award
  • 1976 | Ten Outstanding Young Persons Award – Taiwan
  • 1967 | Third Prize for Sculpture, Taiwan Provincial Fine Arts Exhibition
  • 1966 | Prize of Excellence for Sculpture, Taiwan Provincial Fine Arts Exhibition

Selected Public Collections

  • Canada Botanical Gardens, Canada
  • St Catherine’s College, Oxford University, UK
  • Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University, UK
  • University of Cambridge, UK
  • Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel
  • National Museum of Singapore, Singapore

For the full list of exhibitions, art fairs, awards and collections, please contact the gallery at enquiry@ipreciation.com.

Further Information

For further information on Ju Ming and his work, please refer to the following institutional and reference resources:

Institutional Resources

Market and Auction Records

Images of Artworks