About The Artist

Guo-Qing Zhang Heaton was born in the northwestern deserts of Gansu, China during the Great Famine of 1958-61. Her grandfather was merchant who transported his wares by caravan to desert oasis cites like Urumuchi. Upon graduating from high school she was sent down by Mao to a mass collective farm, but after his death in 1976, Guo-Qing was able to obtain one of the first university positions at Beijing Central University of Art (now Tsinghua University’s Academy of Arts and Design) just as China reopened its institutions of higher education following The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Upon graduating in 1982 she was given a teaching position at the X'ian University of Fine Art where she tough for 5 years. During this time she completed a major public commission for city of Xi'an and then obtained permission to leave the country to enter graduate school in Japan in 1987. She studied under the dry lacquer master Shinkai Osamu of Kobe and graduated top of her class from Kyoto University of Fine Arts in 1991 with an Masters of Fine Arts. She then moved to New York City with James Heaton and continued her art career, placing works of both lacquer and brush painting in collections all over the world.