Ju Ming (Zhu Ming)

executed in 1995, this work is number 1 from an edition of 10

Hakone, The Hakone Open-Air Museum, Ju Ming, 1995, different edition exhibited
Macao, Temporary Exhibition Gallery of the Civic and Municipal Affairs Bureau, Sculpture Exhibition of Ju Ming: Taichi & Living World Series, 2005, this edition exhibited

Ju Ming, The Hakone Open-Air Museum, Hakone, 1995, p. 20, different edition illustrated in colour
Sculptures Ju Ming: Taichi and Living World Series, Civic and Municipal Affairs Bureau, Macao, 2005, pp. 24 & 40, illustrated in colour

This work is consistent with the artist's chosen medium and working method. It is in our opinion that the work is in very good condition.
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After Kung Fu: the Great Beauty of Profundity

The internal contradictions of life play out in mutual opposition, restriction, and repulsion, but also in mutual association, symbiosis, infiltration, and transformation. Chinese Kung Fu encompasses all of the above. It balances life’s internal contradictions and develops the great beauty of profundity within its practitioners. Kung Fu teaches one to attack, defend, and strengthen one’s body, and through these teachings, it enacts a process of growth from “awareness” to “fluency”. The development of Ju Ming’s Taichi series can also be seen as a progression from “awareness” to “fluency”. The subject material of the sculptures is Kung Fu, and Ju Ming’s creative process is also a kind of Kung Fu. This practice of Kung Fu is related to what Ju Ming calls his “ascetic practice of art”, which over the course of several decades allowed him to achieve the status of an international artist, develop a mature vocabulary of sculpture, perfect his artistic style, and ultimately become a world-class master of modern sculpture.

After Ju Ming apprenticed himself to Yuyu Yang, his master observed that his physique was slim and and not robust, so he suggested that Ju Ming study Taichi. This inspired Ju Ming’s most representative sculpture series, the Taichi series. Taichi is a branch of Kung Fu that gives expression to the principles of forgetting the self, non-action, using the strength of one’s opponent, and the Doctrine of the Mean. Taichi strikes an exquisite balance between yielding gentleness and free-flowing power; its practitioners seek to transcend the boundaries between themselves and the external world. Ju Ming once said, “Taichi is a kind of exercise created by people in ancient China, and it is the best example I know of ‘unity between man and nature’. It uses the four limbs, five senses, blood and breath of the body to interact with and imitate the best phenomena of the cosmos”. The first incarnation of Ju Ming’s Taichi series was a number of sculptures titled Kung Fu, which appeared in his 1976 exhibition at the National Museum of History in Taipei. However, these Kung Fu sculptures were more formally similar to Ju Ming’s earlier native culture sculptures, and their portrayal of Taichi boxing was relatively realistic. In 1977, when Ju Ming showed 28 Taichi sculptures at an exhibition at the Tokyo Central Art Museum in Japan, his Taichi series had truly taken shape.

In the early 1980s, as Ju Ming’s understanding of Taichi continued to deepen, he gradually ceased to restrict himself to the portrayal of fixed poses. Instead, he began to portray the instant of a dynamic twist or turn. These were the prototypes for the large-scale Taichi series of sculptures that came later. There are five bronze sculptures from the year 1984 in this special auction: Taichi Series: Thrust (Lot 1012), Taichi Series: Kick (Lot 1013), Taichi Series: Closed Taichi (Lot 1015), Taichi Series: Two-fisted Ear Strike (Lot 1016), and Taichi Series: Kick (Lot 1023). These prototypical works are rare and valuable examples of the sculptor’s early work in the series. Ju Ming had moved on from his sculptural practice of the late 1970s, during which he created his Kung Fu series of sculptures based on photographs. He began to look beyond details in order to grasp the whole, and he brought his knife’s edge to his materials with the spark of paving a new path based on what he had learned from his continuing study of martial arts. In his forthright new process, and he did not attempt to smooth out the marks of the blade  in his artworks, and so that texture of his materials is distinctly discernible in the deft manoeuvrings of his blade. He once pointed out that his Taichi sculptures do not always directly correspond to diagrams of Taichi postures: as Ju Ming stated, he “follows the idea, not the form, and carves the spirit of Taichi. Whether or not it looks like the diagrams is unimportant”. Although his prototype sculptures are figurative, they also express a high degree of freedom. Their abstract structures are manifestations of thousands of years of Chinese culture. He incorporated aspects of traditional scholarly life, such as the non-figurative qualities of calligraphy lines and ink painting, as well as the abstract aesthetics of rocky cliffs and carved-wood window screens. Ju Ming’s change in creative direction, and his gradual progress toward a more fully spiritual practice, are evident in the eloquent simplicity and lively appearance of these five sculptures, which anticipate his attainment in sculpture of the great beauty of profundity.

The five prototype sculptures from 1984 provide some insight into the large-scale Taichi sculptures Ju Ming made in the mid-1990s. Taichi Series: Stomp Advance (Lot 1011) possesses a comparatively static and contained sense of weight. Seen together with the prototype Taichi Series: Thrust, it is evident that the later work is an enlarged extrapolation of the earlier sculpture. Both figures seem to be in the midst of the same action: moving the hands while standing in a wide-legged stance. The rock-like surface of the later, more mature sculpture is an improvement on the unfinished texture of the earlier sculpture. Taichi Series: Spin Kick (Lot 1014) presents the viewer with a vision of a dynamic spinning motion that retains stability and balance. This sculpture adapts the powerful strike of the prototype Taichi Series: Turn Stomp (Lot 1013) into a harmonious action that is more steady and compact as the figure transitions to the posture of the another prototype, Taichi Series: Enter Taichi (Lot 1015). Similarly, Taichi Series: Thrust (Lot 1022) portrays a transition between the postures of the prototypes Taichi Series: Strike with Fists (Lot 1016) and Taichi Series: Side Kick (Lot 1023). Sculpture is an art form with a natural sense of weight; by moderating this sense of weight, the artist can conjure qualities of graceful and lithe motion. Ju Ming’s sculptures possess both weight and dynamism, a result of his evolution as an artist. He built on his prototypes from the mid-1980s to add weight and dynamism to his large-scale works from the mid-1990s as his Taichi series reached its apex.