MIAN SITU - LIMITED EDITIONS

MIAN SITU
The Golden Mountain - Arriving in San Francisco, 1865

MIAN SITU
The Overseer, San Francisco, 1905

MIAN SITU
The Powder Monkeys, Cape Horn, 1865

MIAN SITU
Preparing for the Festival, San Francisco, 1904

On the fifteenth day of the first month of the lunar year, the center of every town, city and village in China glows with the light from hundreds of paper lanterns. The Shang Yuan festival (or lantern festival) draws families from their homes into the packed streets to bask in the auspicious red light of the new year. Riddles are written and solved and yuan xiao or sticky rice dumplings are eaten to celebrate harmony and happiness in every family.

MIAN SITU
San Francisco, April 18, 1906

Rarely does the individual collector have the opportunity to own a museum-caliber work of art. With San Francisco, April 18, 1906 , Mian Situ's chronicling of the Chinese immigrant's place in the expansion of the American West has hit a highwater
mark.

At five o'clock on that April morning, the city of San Francisco had just begun to stir from its slumber. A mere fifteen minutes later, the entire city was in turmoil as it shook with the force of a massive earthquake. For days, what was left of the city would burn.

On Sacramento Street near Chinatown, the great disaster has driven citizens of all ethnicities and classes from their homes and, as one, they head for safer ground, unsure what the next few hours will bring. This is, perhaps, the defining element of the image, the balance between the human and emotional character of the composition with the magnitude of the historic
event.

Collectors with their finger on the pulse of the art world already know that Mian Situ's star is rising fast. At the Autry National Center's 2008 Masters of the American West Fine Art Exhibition and Sale the original painting, which had a reserve price of $150,000, sold for $576,100. Situ was also the first recipient of the Gene Autry Memorial Award, given in recognition of the most outstanding presentation of three or more works.

MIAN SITU
Sutter's Gold, 1850

MIAN SITU
Ten Miles in One Day, Victory Camp, Utah, April 28, 1869

In 1862 the Pacific Railway Act provided funding for a transcontinental railway that would connect burgeoning California with the rest of the country. The Union Pacific Railroad was given the contract to build west from Omaha, Nebraska, and the Central Pacific Railroad would build east from Sacramento, California. In 1869 the two railroads met at Promontory Summit in Utah Territory.

Victory Camp (later named Rozel Point), located west of Promontory, was so called because Charles Crocker of the Central Pacific won a $10,000 wager from the Union Pacific that his crews could lay more miles of track than the Union Pacific. The Central Pacific hired an additional crew of Chinese laborers. Working alongside the Irish track layers, they built over ten miles of track in twelve hours, a feat that has never been equaled. Their efforts completed the Central Pacific segment of the Transcontinental Railroad. On May 10, 1869, the two tracks met at Promontory Summit in the famous Golden Spike ceremony. Local officials turned out to drive the ceremonial Golden Spike with the ceremonial silver sledgehammer, which made official the joining of the East Coast and the West. After the ceremony had ended, the Golden Spike and laurel railroad tie were removed, and Chinese laborers quietly finished the track with a wooden tie and steel spike.

Mian Situ, recipient of the numerous awards from the Autry Museum of the American West, celebrates this milestone in his new painting. At the Museum's 2007 Masters of the American West Fine Art Exhibition and Sale, Ten Miles in One Day sold for $251, 200 at silent-bid auction.

MIAN SITU
Toy Maker of Ross Alley, San Francisco, 1906

MIAN SITU
Wa Girl

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Christian missionaries had been in China for several hundred years, which meant that many Chinese immigrants had encountered Christianity before they ever set foot on American soil.