Labels:text | newspaper | screenshot OCR: ARTS dominated by commu- GROWING UP POOR nist ideology. The an- AND AS AN OUTSIDER swer, however, didn't IN CHINA DIDN'T STOP lie in martial arts. Ting TING FROM ACHIEVING took to reading, but before long he found HIS DREAM OF a better way to es- BECOMING AN ARTIST cape. Through paint- . .. TO SOAR TO ing, the young man INTERNATIONAL began to immerse ACCLAIM himself in his own im- aginary worlds, where he finally was able to find peace. Growing up poor and as an outsider in revolutionary China didn't stop Ting from DREAM achieving his dream of becoming an artist Lacking the money to buy oil who arrived in the United States in 1980 with paint, the 11-year-old Ting used cooking oil mixed US$20 in his pocket, to soar to international ac- with pigments to complete his first portrait, a study claim as an artist in the mid-1980s. In many ways, of an elderly peasant on the steppes of Ting's his life runs parallel to the heroes in Horatio home province of Shanxi in northwest China. Alger's 19th-century tales of rags to riches. That kind of ingenuity and resolve allowed Ting, "I like the high ceiling and the brightness," says
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