Southeast University

Wang Shu is a Chinese architect based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. He is the dean of the School of Architecture of the China Academy of Art. In... 2012, Wang became the first Chinese citizen to win the Pritzker Prize, the world's top prize in architecture. Wang Shu was born on 4 November 1963 in Ürümqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China's far west. He began to draw and paint as a child, without any formal training in art. As a compromise between art, his passion, and engineering, his parents' recommendation, Wang chose to study architecture at the Nanjing Institute of Technology in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province and received a bachelor's degree in 1985 and a master's degree in 1988. Although Wang lived in Ürümqi and Beijing in his early life, after college he moved to Hangzhou for the city's natural landscapes and ancient tradition of art. He worked for the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts and in 1990 completed his first architectural project, a youth centre in the small city of Haining near Hangzhou. Wang did not have any commissions between 1990 and 1998.
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