TING Shao Kuang has been called one of the world's 100 most important artists since the 14th century, compared with Giotto and Gauguin, and at age 72 he is still pushing frontiers in his pursuit of beauty in magical colors.

No task, it appears, is too daunting for Ting, a US citizen, whose latest work is a 24-meter x16-meter stained-glass collage of a mystical tropical rainforest. Containing 300,000 pieces, it forms a wall at the entrance to the underground theater of the new Shanghai Culture Square that officially opens to the public in late September.

Titled "The Origins of Life," the glass mural in a multitude of violets, pinks and blue-greens depicts a tranquil, primal forest filled with exuberant flowers and plants. A flock of white cranes soars into the sky.

"It's more like an installation with LED lights and music," said Ting in an interview when he was overseeing the installation.

His work combines both traditional Chinese and Western techniques and sensibilities. Ting is famous for his stylized paintings of long, graceful Dai ethnic women from Yunnan Province in southern China.

He lived and taught in Kunming, the provincial capital city, for 18 years and because of his passion for local exotic scenes he is sometimes compared with Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) who lived in Tahiti from 1891 and painted in an Impressionist style.

Ting has also been called the founder of China's Yunnan School of art, though he doesn't quite agree, saying he prefers to be recognized for his romantic and idealized painting style. He painted a renowned mural that hangs in the Yunnan Hall of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

In Shanghai, he painted the blazing mural "Goddess of Art" for the Shanghai Grand Theater in 1999.

Ting, who has lived in the United States since 1980, has held at least a thousand solo exhibitions and his works are collected by museums, institutions and individuals.

In 1990 he was honored as one of the world's 100 greatest artists since the 14th century at the International Art Expo in Japan. He was the only Chinese on that list.

On his recent visit to the city, Ting, who was born in a village in Shaanxi Province, spoke with Shanghai Daily about his latest work, his life and philosophy.

Though he looks serious in photos, he is highly approachable and hospitable. He dresses casually and wears his hair long, to the neck, and, of course, he smokes.

"My tea is way better than the hotel's. Give it a try." he said.

Magical mosaic

"This work stands on the shoulders of giants," Ting said humbly, referring to his glass collage of the tropical rain forest that also has the feel of stained glass in cathedrals of the Middle Ages.

Two years ago Ting was invited to brainstorm a billboard-sized mural for the underground theater of Shanghai Culture Square. The original idea was to use copper sheets, but Ting insisted on stained glass, saying it would bring light into the hall while the copper would darken as it oxidized.

His draft was magnified 100 times and because of the enlargement his drawing had to be especially detailed and precise. He found his glass at a factory in Los Angeles where he was amazed to find more than 2,000 hues of brilliance and subtlety to match every bold stroke and nuance of his work. He handpicked each piece of glass. He numbered them and glued them to a sheet of colorless glass to create his vibrant jungle.

"Due to modern technology, glass painting now breaks technical shackles and becomes hugely diversified in composition and colors," Ting said. "Two thousand colors - nearly as many as French master of color Delacrois created in his palate," he said.

"Times have changed and people are now longing for new visual impact. We can use some help from a sister art of stained glass to achieve this goal."

Ting now plans to convert his signature 1994 work "Motherhood" (101.6 cm x 101.6 cm) into a glass mural or collage to be showcased in Taiwan. He has been compared to the Florentine artist Giotto (1266-1337) for his exquisite figures, including madonnas, and what one critic called his "exaltation of love."

"I will spend more time on glass painting to advance the techniques," he said, adding that he aims one day to decorate the entire exterior of a building with glass murals.

Born in 1939 in Gu County, Shaanxi Province, Ting moved at an early age to Beijing. His parents fled to Taiwan in 1949, leaving Ting with a grandmother. He turned to art, making his own paints using cooking oil and demonstrating astonishing talent at an early age.

In 1957 he entered the Central Academy of Craft Art, studying oil painting, traditional Chinese painting and engraving. Like most of his peers, he was fascinated by Picasso, Matisse and Modigliani and experimented with new themes and techniques.

Before graduation he spent six months in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan Province, to prepare his final painting for graduation.

"You can imagine how it was for a northern boy to set foot in that fantastic land with tropical jungles full of vigor and vitality," Ting recalled with animation. "The minorities were lovably simple and kind. Once I met an Wa ethnic man carrying a small deer over his shoulder. We had never met before, but he came up to me, chopped the carcass in half and shared it with me."

He was touched by the people's warmth and egalitarianism and fell in love with a Yunnan girl, though they never married. He painted "Paradise" in memory of their love.

After graduation in 1962 he was assigned to teach at Yunnan Art University. His creativity was unleashed but his experimentation, ethnic themes and abstract style did not find favor with authorities, especially during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), when art was supposed to serve politics. He drew at night and burned his works before they could be discovered and criticized.

In 1967 he was suspended from his teaching job and when he feared imprisonment, he fled north to Gansu Province, finding sanctuary in monasteries and studying ancient Buddhist art along the Silk Road in Dunhuang.

In 1968 he returned though he was not allowed to teach. After the "cultural revolution," he and like-minded artists formed an association and exhibited their works. He was commissioned to paint the Yunnan mural for Beijing's Great Hall.

Broke in America

In 1980, Ting dropped everything and moved to the United States, where a sister lived. He had little money, taught art at UCLA and tried in vain to sell his work.

Ting visited museums, studied Chinese art history and tried to find his own style. In 1986 a gallery owner stumbled on his work, took it to the New York Art Expo that year - and Ting found himself famous. Prices of his works soared and accolades poured in.

But he wasn't overawed.

"Too much business activity undermines an artist's career. There were so many exhibitions waiting for me that I didn't even have time to paint," Ting said.

"If you're forced to paint repeatedly, with only techniques but no inner feelings, it's nothing but artistic suicide. Don't pick up a paint brush if you don't have feeling. It takes courage for artists to jump out of the loop."

But he acquired that wisdom.

In 1996, Ting bought a 4,200-square-meter, three-story house in Beverly Hills for US$30 million. It was once called one of America's five great houses. It dazzled Madonna and Michael Jackson.

But it became an albatross. "People always knocked at the door, asking to visit. It was even listed as a tourist spot in brochures. Can you believe that?" Ting said.

He sold it in 2004. He terminated his gallery contracts, bought back some paintings and burned the ones he didn't like. He now lives in a small, quiet town in Southern California and paints whenever he wants.

"I guess I'm the only one who dares to burn my paintings," Ting joked. "Keeping them would only humiliate me.

"Most artists have an ego-complex. They are too easily satisfied and too idle to deny themselves anything. Critical thinking is essential. It helps prolong the artistic life."

He cited a Chinese saying that one should "remain unperturbed whether favored or humiliated." But he said "many people fail in the face of glory. I don't want to be a flash in the pan."

Last year, Ting painted "Dust and Ashes of Thirty Scholarly Honors," a famous line from a poem by general and poet Yue Fei (1103-42) of Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127). The canvas hangs in his living room and reminds him of his work and mortality.

Eternal topics

Ting reads a lot in his spare time and is drawn to the I Ching and its theme of harmony.

"Eternal topics such as harmony between humans and nature are universally accepted. They have no restraints of space, time and cultural background, so they stand throughout history," he said. Famed for depicting Dai ethnic women, Ting now prefers painting more abstract works.

He urges young Chinese artists to "find their roots in Chinese folk art and develop their own styles," the path Ting himself took. "They must learn to speak their own voices and not blindly follow trends."

What really awes the world are always Chinese traditional arts, he said, citing the Dunhuang frescoes, sculptures in the Mogao Grottoes and Mijishan Grottoes in Gansu Province.

"These are the essence of Chinese arts. The craftsmen who spent their live in grottoes and devoted themselves to art are the real professional artists," he said in an earlier interview.

After years of comparative study, Ting expressed confidence in Chinese art.

"Western art is gradually drawing close to the East," he told Shanghai Daily.

"Since ancient Greece, Westerners have been following a road of realism, in which they scientifically study nature and try to conquer it, based on the dichotomy proposed by Socrates. So it is with Western art and then came art anatomy, perspective drawing and chromatics.

"But Chinese art, especially traditional painting, never meant to be realistic from the very beginning. Zhuangzi claims 'Heaven, Earth and I come into being together, and all things and I are one.' The Chinese place high value on the harmony between human and nature," Ting said.

"With development of photography and cinematography, Western classic painting faces huge threats," he said, adding that many artists became photographers and film directors. "After the modern art movement (1850 to mid-1960s), Western artists are changing their minds.

"We must not paint what we think we see, but what we see," he quoted Cezanne as saying. The artist once said: "You must think. The eye is not enough; it needs to think as well."

"In this case, it's time for China to have some contemporary art masters," Ting said.