Mansheng Wang is a twenty-first-century manifestation of the scholar-' artist, an identity that has a centuries-long presence in the history of Chinese art. He is not a professional artist, that is, trained in an art school or at the hands of a mentor artist or craftsman to create art on demand or for commercial purposes. Hegrew up in the ig6os and 19705 in Taiyuan, Shanxi about 320 miles southwest of Beijing, and was graduated in 1985 from Fudan University in Shanghai as a student of Chinese literature. An early interest in Chinese calligraphy and ten years spent producing television documentaries in Beijing, prior to moving to the United States in 1996, gave him a wealth of experience and experimentation in the art of creating visual images. All of this quite naturally progressed into a love of putting ink onto paper in a purposeful, artistic way—even if it meant working for nearly eighteen years largely unrecognized and overlooked in the rather hot pursuit of contemporary Chinese art that brewed in the West in the decades on either side of the new millennium. Within the past four years Mansheng Wang's art has found its proper place and increasing recognition in the contemporary Chinese art world, first in the US and then in China.
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