Yang Mingshan (1933-2017) was born in an ordinary family in the suburbs of Moscow, the former Soviet Union. His father Yang Yunge is Chinese, his ancestral home is Shandong, and his mother Anna Vaxing is Russian. He returned to China with his father in 1939, graduated from Urumqi No. 1 Middle School in 1953, and was admitted to the Department of Fine Arts of Northwest Normal University in the same year. He studied under famous painters Lu Sibai and Huang Zhou. During his university years, his works were selected for the National Youth Art Exhibition and won the third prize. He graduated in 1957 and stayed in school to teach. In 1961, he was transferred to the Department of Fine Arts of Xinjiang Art Institute to teach. Mr. Yang Mingshan lived, studied and worked in China for more than 40 years before moving to Australia in 1979, and has been engaged in art education.
Since the 1970s, Chinese and foreign painters have turned their attention to western China. A large number of painters have come to Xinjiang to collect folk songs. All of these painters who have come into contact with Mr. Yang Mingshan were impressed by his character and art. In the late 1970s, Mr. Yang Mingshan was invited by friends in the Beijing painting circle to hold an informal exhibition of his works in Beijing. It was called an exhibition, but in fact it was just a display of 20 to 30 paintings with a slight backing of cardboard in an ordinary room. The number of people who watched was limited to a few people in the industry. But such a small-scale exchange exhibition aroused a strong response from the audience. They simply couldn't believe that this was from the hands of a frontier painter. The unique dignity revealed in the works was respectable. After seeing the works, Mr. Wu Zuoren, the then president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, tried to retain Mr. Yang Mingshan and hoped that he could come to the Central Academy of Fine Arts to teach. Mr. Wu Zuoren wrote four words for him with his sigh: "Fragrant Grass at the End of the World". This calligraphy is still hanging in Mr. Yang Mingshan's home.
Mr. Yang Mingshan has been engaged in art research and art teaching throughout his life. We have little research on his artistic creation and art teaching. Due to objective conditions, even those who worked with Mr. Yang Mingshan or his peers have never fully appreciated the full picture of his works. In the years since he moved to Australia, he has won the finalist award of the Australian "Duck Moran" portrait competition three times. In 1995, his landscape painting "The Rising Moon" won the gold medal of the Australian Landscape Painting Competition held in Melbourne. These honors indicate that Mr. Yang Mingshan has entered the mainstream painting circle in Australia.
Mr. Yang Mingshan has been indifferent to fame and fortune throughout his life, adhering to the upright feelings of literati, adhering to the principle of simple life, and his broad mind and profound accumulation have reached peace. Mr. Tao Xingzhi wrote the school motto for Beijing Normal University: Learn to be a teacher, and act as a model for the world. Mr. Yang Mingshan has achieved this. Having lived abroad for more than 30 years, Mr. Yang Mingshan has also entered his 80s from his prime, but he has always been concerned about the hot land of western China and his students. He has such a wish: to leave his works to China, Xinjiang, and the next generation.
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