Wang Ming was born in Tianjin, China in 1921 and moved to the United States in 1951. In 2009, he was the subject of a solo exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC, making him the first Asian-American artist to exhibit at the museum. He has also exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; David Findlay Gallery, New York; and the Qingdao Museum of Fine Arts, Qingdao, China, among others. Ming's work in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the American Embassy in Beijing, China; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the National Art Museum of China, among others. The artist passed away in Bethesda, Maryland in 2016.
Wang Ming's work combines traditional Chinese disciplines with Western styles found in the works of Juan Miro and Paul Klee. Having exhibited alongside such Washington Color School artists as Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis and Thomas Downing, Ming's paintings have a unique sensibility towards color and design. Though his energetic marks evoke the grand action painting of Jackson Pollock, Ming possesses a calligrapher's control, offering a spatial quality that makes the artist's small-scale paintings look like galaxies. In a review in the New York Times in 1997, Holland Cotter called Ming Wang's respect for tradition a "calligraphic mandala in which writing and painting come indissolubly together."
