The artist commissioned to create a Land Run Centennial sculpture for Tuisas River Parks comes from the other side of the world. Desthis distance, he is no stranger to the….that fueled Oklahoma’s famous front event

　　Xiaojia Peng was a teenager during Mao ZeDong’s Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s when schools were closed. Books…..and intellectuals’ imprisoned. He never saw his parents during the revolution because they were in the prison. His mother was a writer and editor, his father was an executive with the Chinese Red Cross later director of the Palace Museum in Forbidden City. Throughout those years, …was raised by an older brother. He…what semblance of school existed…on a farm and eventually was as a woodcarver in a Shanghai art …where he carved fiures of….soldiers and farmers holding Mao’s red book.

　　It was a tumultuous, confusing time for young boy, a time that has infused Peng’s work ever since. His sculptures in wood and bronze with their recurring images little boy teetering upside down on a…head, are an expression of what it like to come of age during China’s Cultural Revolution.

　　Everything was crazy and I could not understand why, says Peng who hearding from his parents for six years

　　Peng who grew up in Beijing, came to the United States in 1985 to study art or more specifically, modern art. Although he had received extensive training in China as a student at Beijing’s central Academy of Fine Art, he found no reception for contemporary sculpture among his Chinese instructors.

　　In China, you couldn’t get the influence of modern art, says Peng “My school was like a 19th century European academy. You studied Greek sculpture, you made plaster molds. Basically it was all looking backward.

　　Although Peng was a top tudent at the academy, one of the five to be accepted in 1978, he longed to bread away and express himself in a more modern vein. When he finally did, he received only unsympathetic criticism. He entered his first contemporary sculpture in an exhibition in Beijing short after he graduated from the academy.

　　“My teacher who was one at the judge was surprised”, say Peng, He asked me. Why I had changed. He didn’t understand. The other judge said my work was awful, decided I better come overseas to study modern art.

　　Peng sent letter to universities in the U.S. asking for information about art programs. He worte to TU in the advise of an instructor who has visited Tuisa and liked it. TU associate art professor and graduate student advisor Chuck Tomlins responded to Peng’s inquiry and he entered the graduate art program in September 1985

　　“What I saw was real potential” says Tronlins “Here was a man trapped in a time wrap. He had the desire to expand his creative energies. But he was receiving no encouragement or acceptance” Tornlins pinion of Peng’s work is high to say the least. “I think he could be the next Islam Noguchi” he says, referring to the famous Japanse-American sculptor.

　　Peng is not sure of his plans after graduation. He has applied to other art schools including Chicago Art Institution and the University of Maryland which has a well-known sculpture department and hopes to pursue his MF A degree which is the equivalent of a doctorate in fine art

　　The M.A. Doran Gallery in Tuisa carries Peng’s sculpture and it is regularly exhibited in shows at TU’s Alexandre Hogue Gallery. The next show featuring Peng’s work will be May4 through June2 at the Hogue Gallery. His sculpture will be on display with pieces by three other graduate students, Sonne Hughes, Krystal Zwayer and Pat Barton

　　Influences on Peng’s sculpture are easy to spot; the simple shapes of Henry Moore the powerful abstractions of Pablo Picasso the monumental forms of Isamu Noguch and Constatin Brancusi. These are the 20th century artists who have inspired him since coming to US to be a modern artist

　　When Peng moves on to continue his career. He will leave behind something for the city—his first commissioned work. It is a nice twist that this public sculpture commemorating Oklahoma’s Land Run was created by a Chinese artist who came to Oklahoma to stake a claim of his own