Xue Mingde (Samuel Huang)

Xue Mingde (Samuel Huang)

... was born in 1955 in Sichuan. During der Cultural Revolution, at the age of 14, he was arrested for the first time. As a factory worker he started painting, and in the late 1970s he organized his first private exhibition called "Weeds". In early 1979 he went to Beijing where he held an open-air exhibition of his oil paintings right in front of the Xidan Democracy Wall. In Beijing he got in contact with a number of activists of the "Beijing Spring" activists, and he met several artists of the "Stars" Group. Back in Sichuan he got arrested several times for "hooliganism", a he had to spend a number of years in prison. In 1993 Xue Mingde moved to the United States and became a US citizen under the name of "Samuel Huang". With his new name and passport he managed to travel to Chongqing in 2000 to meet his ailing mother the first time after 17 years. Xue Mingde now lives in New your, he regularly holds exhibitions of his work, and he participates in activities of the Chinese democracy movement in exile.