Ju Ming

Ju Ming was born Ju Chuan-tai on 20 January 1938 in Miaoli County, Taiwan. He completed only a primary school education. At about age 15, in the early 1950s, he began an apprenticeship in traditional woodcarving under master craftsman Lee Chin-chuan, training for roughly three years and four months and working on temple restoration and religious statuary. He won prizes for sculpture at the Taiwan Provincial Fine Arts Exhibition in 1966 and 1967, and received Taiwan's Chinese Literature and Art Award and a Ten Outstanding Young Persons Award in 1976.

Seeking more formal grounding, Ju re-apprenticed himself in 1968 to modernist sculptor Yuyu Yang in Taipei, studying with him for close to seven years, into the mid-1970s. Yang is also credited with introducing Ju to the practice of tai chi, which became the basis of the Taichi series he began developing through the 1970s. He later expanded into the Living World series, depicting scenes of everyday human life in bronze, wood, and stainless steel, from the 1980s onward.

Ju used his commercial success to found and fund the Ju Ming Museum, a roughly 12-hectare outdoor museum in the mountains of Jinshan, in New Taipei City, that he designed himself and that now holds most of his major sculptures. He received Taiwan's National Cultural Award (the Executive Yuan Cultural Award) in 2004 and the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in 2007, along with honorary doctorates from Fu Jen Catholic University (2003) and the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2011).

Ju Ming died on 22 April 2023 at his home in Taipei, at age 85. Taiwanese authorities said a preliminary postmortem indicated the cause was asphyxiation, and the death was reported by the Taipei Times and the South China Morning Post as an apparent suicide.

Curatorial writing around the inaugural Vancouver Biennale, which included his Tai-Chi Single Whip, described Ju Ming as "the Father of Modern Sculpture in China," crediting him with forging a signature style recognized throughout the art world. Critics and curators have consistently framed his career around the fusion of two traditions: the disciplined manual craft of Buddhist woodcarving learned under Lee Chin-chuan, and the abstracted, modernist approach to form he absorbed from Yuyu Yang. The Taichi series, in particular, has been read as translating a bodily, meditative practice into blocky, weighted mass, while the later Living World series shifted that same monumentality toward ordinary human subjects. His large-scale public commissions, including works installed outside Exchange Square in Hong Kong, are frequently cited as evidence that his sculpture succeeded as civic art as much as gallery or museum art.

Artnet News reported, in its 2023 coverage of his death, that Ju Ming's auction record stood at approximately USD 2.7 million for an edition of one of his bronze sculptures. The exact work, auction house, and sale date behind that figure are not confirmed in available sources, so no specific title, venue, or date is asserted here. His broader market is wide rather than deep: HENI market data cites cumulative auction sales of roughly USD 171.9 million over the preceding 24 years, consistent with frequent sales of the Taichi and Living World series across many price tiers rather than a market concentrated in a small number of headline results. His work has been shown by Alisan Fine Arts in Hong Kong since 1999 and by Asia Art Center in Taipei and Beijing, which continues to place his work at international fairs, though current gallery arrangements for his estate since his 2023 death have not been independently confirmed.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Ju Ming, and authentication rests largely on documentation through the Ju Ming Museum and the galleries that have represented him, so provenance research should begin there. His market is unusually wide rather than deep, with a very high volume of auction appearances relative to most artists of comparable museum standing, which means broad availability at moderate price points alongside occasional much higher results. Since his death in 2023, secondary supply has continued to move through galleries including Alisan Fine Arts and Asia Art Center, though the current representation arrangements for his estate have not been independently confirmed, and collectors should expect the market's structure and the management of his legacy through the museum he founded to keep shaping how his work is priced and placed going forward.