As a child of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Jian Wang had few opportunities to pursue his talent and passion for painting. Living the life of an artist was inconceivable.
　　But his dream would not die. A chance encounter in China opened the door for him to come to Sacramento, where he trained with the world-renowned artist Wayne Thiebaud.
　　Twenty years later, Jian's work can be found in homes, galleries, museums, and public spaces across the country and around the world.
　　And now, his art is being celebrated in his homeland. In the summer of 2006, Jian returned to China to teach and to paint in anticipation of his first one-man exhibition there.
　　Chinese society has undergone a sea change in the last twenty years. But then, so has Jian.
　　JIAN WANG: I was drawn to studying art at age 12, and studied with a high school art teacher, and I joined his after-school program, and spend every day there from 3 maybe until 10 o'clock.
　　JIAN WANG: After the studio studies, I went back home.  I would continue to draw until midnight, everyday.  My mom had to set a rule.  So by 12 o'clock she would turn off the light because at that time, three generations - with grandma, my parents, and my brother and sister - we live in one room.
　　JIAN WANG: I was one of the six selected young students to join the art academy for youth.  It was a sponsored program by the city government.  So I had studied there and have a chance to meet the artists of the city at the time.  I think have broadly influenced me, and given me a dream someday to be an artist.
　　WAYNE THEIBAUD, ARTIST/TEACHER: He's got a very interesting tradition which he comes out of, having been trained in China. We don't in this country train our students nearly as rigorously.
　　JIAN WANG: During the Cultural Revolution time, they shut off the colleges for 10 years.  I never got a permit to take the art college exam, and that had limited me the chance to become an artist in China. But I have never give up practice even though I was in college studying engineering.
　　JIAN WANG: I was an engineering student for four years there and got my degree.  But every little time I have, besides studying engineering, I was involved with art: painting the propaganda boards, drawing portraits to students, and doing some stone carvings.
　　JIAN WANG: The fortunate part about why I had not been in art college: if I were admitted in art college, I would not have a chance to meet Marjorie.
　　MARJORIE FRANCISCO, FRIEND/SPONSOR: Oh, I always wanted to go to China.  I love Chinese painting, and when I had a chance to go, I went!  And it was every bit as good as I thought it would be.  They treated me extremely well.  They were so kind to me - and he was kind to me.
　　MARJORIE FRANCISCO: He was always my guide, and took me wherever I had to go, and that's how we got to know each other.  You know, he always put up with the crazy foreigner!
　　JIAN WANG: Marjorie was a retired art teacher from Carmichael, and went to China to travel and were invited to teach English in my college.  She stays there for two years.  During that period of time we have become friends.
　　MARJORIE FRANCISCO: At that time he was doing calligraphy for the school; he had posters, and he did calligraphy for everything that happened there. And I just could see that he had it. You know, after I was there and saw a show, I just could see that he had something special. And he was a special person, that's for sure.
　　JIAN WANG: She went to our wedding, and saw our daughter is born, and…the day before she came back to U.S., and she asked me, "Jian, why don't you want to be a professional artist, after all those activities?  And then you have involved with the city and the school."  And I said, "It's impossible!"
　　MARJORIE FRANCISCO: I just wanted to help somebody who wanted to come here as much as he did.
　　JIAN WANG: She said, "If I help to you come to America, do you have the courage to study art?"  And I said, "Yeah, of course."  But I have no idea what courage means at the time, you know?
　　PHIL HITCHCOCK, DIRECTOR, SCHOOL OF THE ARTS, CSUS: He took the chance, took fear on head-on, left China, came here, had to live in a different environment than his wife.  I don't think he ever saw a negative side.  He never saw how he couldn't get there.  It was: how am I going to get there?
　　MARJORIE FRANCISCO: It wasn't that easy to do.  (laughs)  They weren't that anxious to have a Chinese person here because they knew they didn't really go back.  You have to have somebody who will accept you, because they don't want you coming here expecting to stay.  We couldn't find anybody who would accept him as an artist.
　　JIAN WANG: After half a year she got me acceptance at City College, studying art.  And she sent me $1,000 as my air fare, because it would take my ten-year salary to buy the plane ticket to come here.
　　JIAN WANG: At that moment, I don't know it's courage, but now you look back, it is absolutely courageous.  You left a young daughter at home with your wife.  And then you come here alone, and $200 in your pocket.  Have no idea what life here is.  I was very fortunate that when I'm in college, I have met incredible, supportive professors who have helped me through these days - like Fred Dalkey at City College at the time, and I study with for almost two years.
　　FRED DALKEY, ARTIST/TEACHER: When he came here he was young and doing a little bit of this, a little bit of that; thinking different thoughts, getting an education.  But we had gone to see a show together of a well-known painter here and Jian said, "Well, I can do that!"  And I thought, well, you know I hear that from students all the time.  And so I said, "Well, you know, if you can do that, do it!"  And next thing I knew he had done it.  He did a wonderful series of landscape paintings.
　　MARJORIE FRANCISCO: One day he said to me, "I want to bring Bonnie here."  And I said, "Yes, but I can't be sure I can't be sure I can help anybody once you're all here."  So he said, "That's all right, if I can't take care of her I'll send her back to China."  (laughs)  He never had to send her back.
　　JIAN WANG: After I paid my tuition and all the expenses for three years, we have only 60 dollars a month for grocery.  It was hard, but with all the encouragement and help from the art teachers, like Fred Dalkey, and the kind people like Marjorie, it's bittersweet.  Yeah, it's bittersweet.
　　JIAN WANG: But I enjoyed it because it had a sense of hope.  All those hardships, that I know is not the end of it.  And that beyond that hardship is a sense of hope that I, maybe, will become an artist.
　　WAYNE THIEBAUD: I didn't know who he was.  He showed up in Davis - where I teach - and came in, and his enthusiasm and his sort of real interest in finding out about things, you realize this is one of those fortunate times when you really get a student you can feel excited about.
　　JIAN WANG: To have a chance to study with Wayne in Davis for three years had really enriched my working, and helped me to find myself.
　　PHIL HITCHCOCK: What you would get from Wayne is the experience, the passion, the commitment, intellect of a real painter.
　　RUSS SOLOMON, FOUNDER OF TOWER RECORDS/COLLECTOR: You see a little bit of Thiebaud there, of course.  You see a little bit of Thiebaud all over the place so that's nothing unusual.  But he's different.  He really is different.  He's broken away from that, and that's important in the student/teacher sort of relationship.
　　WAYNE THIEBAUD: Jian's influences are varied.  They take from lots of different sources.  I'm just frankly, frankly flattered that he would use any help that I could have given him.
　　
　　ANNE McHENRY, ARTS PATRON: With his studying and working with people like Wayne Thiebaud, in a miraculous one or two years, there he was.  He was just, he had exhibitions, and people were clamoring to meet him, to buy his work. And with his infectious personality, he was just a natural.
　　FRED DALKEY: I was working as an advisor to a local gallery, so I in fact introduced him to the gallery and got him a show with his paintings.  And there was no stopping him after that.  (laughs)  I mean, he just took off and that was it!
　　RUSS SOLOMON: Years, ago we had a gallery here in town called the Artists Contemporary Gallery.  Jian had an exhibit in there one day, and it was small paintings of watermelons.  And I happen to like watermelon, and so I bought it, because it stood out.  That particular painting stood out in the whole room full of paintings.
　　WAYNE THIEBAUD: Painting is really a metaphor of a body.  Things like interval and grace.  The idea of tension.  Pressure.
　　RUSS SOLOMON: The portraits are awfully good.  He seems to bring that person out as a real person, which is what a portrait is all about.
　　FRED DALKEY: He's very romantic; his landscapes are very romantic.  He tends to go for dramatic skies and romantic weather conditions.
　　ANN McHENRY: Icy sort of blues and the pale grayness of his still lifes today; I see the classical reference there.
　　SCOTT SHIELDS, CHIEF CURATOR, CROCKER ART MUSEUM: One of the great things about Jian is that he doesn't limit himself to landscapes, or the figure, or the still life.  He does them all, and he does them all well.  What I think holds his work together is really his ability to manipulate paint.
　　PHIL HITCHCOCK: There's a lot of people who can paint, but there's very few people who really can apply paint, and let the paint be able to articulate.
　　ANNE McHENRY: Jian puts the paint directly on the canvas and moves it around, repositioning it, getting that depth.
　　FRED DALKEY: He doesn't really pre-mix his colors that much, so he's working essentially with raw colors.
　　ANNE McHENRY: The term is "imposto" - the build-up of color on color rather than blending it and putting it on the canvas.
　　SCOTT SHIELDS: He weaves color in every brush stroke.  And he will point out that, "That brush stroke has 17 different colors running through it."  And that's not immediately apparent because your eye mixes those colors.  But they're there, and that's part of why his paintings work.  It's because they're more complex than you would think.
　　WAYNE THIEBAUD: For me, his interest comes from a long tradition of what is known as "premiere coup painting": direct application, bravura thrusts, going for it, realizing it can collapse at any moment.
　　RUSS SOLOMON: It seems to have been executed with - well, you know it was - lightning speed, and that somehow adds to what comes off the canvas.
　　SCOTT SHIELDS: He is an amazingly facile artist, in that he can produce paintings fairly rapidly, and in part it's because of the way he applies paint.  It's quick and sure and he doesn't backtrack very much when he's painting.
　　FRED DALKEY: Years ago, when he was a student, I kind of encouraged him to maybe slow down a little bit.  But that's just not him.  He's going to have to work at that kind of pitch, that kind of energy.
　　ANNE McHENRY: I was talking with my good friend Ruth Rippon, and she once said to him, "You paint fast, don't you, Jian?"  And he said, "Well, yes."  And she said, "Maybe you should slow down."
　　FRED DALKEY: He's the only painter I've ever known that had carpal tunnel from painting.  You know, the stress of just the energy that he throws into the process, the amount of work that he does.
　　SCOTT SHIELDS: Some artists create art because they can, and other artists create art because they have to.  And I think Jian's one of those artists that creates work because he has to.
　　JIAN WANG: For me, the struggle is not just to make a great career out of making painting, but also is an inner voice that I hope shares that struggle with the viewer.  I think that maybe is my essence of my work.
　　JIAN WANG: The work I'm going to prepare for the show in the museum will be mostly culturally connected with the people there now: how they live their life now.
　　PHIL HITCHCOCK: It's going to be really good for him to go to China.  I think he's going to be able to go back there with a certain kind of cultural reflection that is going to be good for him.  I think it'll mature his observations as a painter.  I'm really excited to see what he comes back with.
　　JIAN WANG: I think the experience will really enrich me as an artist - not just the subject matter, but also, I think, the interaction with the art institutions there.
　　ANNE McHENRY: I think this venture off to China is going to be his international awakening.
　　JIAN WANG: I'd been back to China a few times, but not consciously looking for the inspiration for my painting.  But this time I did a little bit of research, purposely looking for the inspiration. And the excitement of the country development and the memory of the childhood that have make me decided that I should go back to China to stay for a period of time to create a body of work.
　　JIAN WANG: I went back to China and stayed for over 3 months there. It was really an eye-opener for me in the sense of the subject matter and the emotional attachment to the country that I grown up with, and now not much things left to be recognized.
　　JIAN WANG: I have this romantic notion for the memory, what I grown up with, and it suddenly all disappeared.  It's especially disappeared in such a rapid pace.
　　JIAN WANG: I planned to paint a lot more than actually I did, and I planned to paint some rural landscapes, villages, and maybe cityscapes also.
　　JIAN WANG: Because my formal years of art education is here, I still feel like I was a foreigner painting the Chinese things, yeah.  And I don't know if it's good or bad, or maybe it's true who I am.
　　JIAN WANG: How to see things and how to paint things, how to construct a still life - all learned from here. So my paintings still look like this American kid painted, you know, so, I don't know I should be proud of that, or disappointed.
　　JIAN WANG: But end up, I was intrigued by the special, specialties of sweets made in Bejing. So I hide in my studio for there months, and made 40-something paintings from these specialty sweets.
　　JIAN WANG: The delicacy of the making and the color; the different material they use and the form and the shape and the simplicity of the object really interested me.
　　JIAN WANG: With the special lighting, I designed it, and the shadow, and the background, I thought it was quite complete individual sculptures, each one of them.
　　JIAN WANG: They have different ideas of what art is about there. They don't see painting as just visual elements. They use painting, or music, or movie, to express an idea.  It's hard for them to understand, you know, those still lifes has any meaning. But I think that's the main disappointment for me.
　　JIAN WANG: I do have some ideas, mostly from sketches and from the photographs I take from China. And I met this old man who sells kites, and I was very intrigued by it, so I'm going to do some painting of that. So I'm still looking forward to go back to China and then accomplish those paintings.
　　JIAN WANG: For me, this is where I grow up, even though I came here at age 28. This is where I arrived from China and all the friends and the emotional attachment is here.
　　MARJORIE FRANCISCO: I expected him to stay two years and he's still here.  (laughs)  And it's wonderful.  He's a citizen now.  He's a citizen of the United States.  He's an American.
　　SCOTT SHIELDS: He's very much now a product of this region, in terms of the way his art looks.  So Sacramento and the Northern California region has really absorbed him, and that comes through in the way he paints.
　　WAYNE THIEBAUD: I think he's young still - under 50. A great series of things done and accomplished behind him to build on.
　　PHIL HITCHCOCK: I would always tell my students that 1% of you are going to make it. And it's not on your talent. It's that you're not willing to work. And I don't think Jian's ever going to be out-worked.
　　RUSS SOLOMON: He's a real nice guy.  (laughs)  He really is - and a hell of a painter!
　　JIAN WANG: In Sacramento, there's over 300 families have my paintings. And luckily that's how I made my friends here also.  And they have been incredible, faithful supporters for my work and my family. And it seems like I can ask them anything, and so it's really something. The painting as vehicle to build this friendship between the community and people is stunning.
　　JIAN WANG: If I were living in L.A., San Francisco, New York, I may be buried by the business, the society. And in Sacramento from the very beginning, a very strong group of supporters have nurtured us, and enabled me to continue the career that I am enjoying now. So it's a really unbelievable journey for the last 20 years.