Photograph by Michel Lunardelli
One of China's first contemporary sculptors, Wang Keping (b. 1949, Beijing) exploded onto the contemporary art scene in the late 1970s alongside fellow artists Huang Rui, Ma Desheng, and Ai Weiwei as a founding member of the early Beijing contemporary art group The Stars (Xing Xing), which fervently championed artistic freedom in China. After living abroad for nearly 30 years, the artist returns to China to present the largest exhibition of his work in the country to date. The exhibition comprises more than 50 wooden sculptures surveying key moments in the artist's 35-year career, ranging from 30 cm to several meters tall in size, variously evoking sensual beauty, grotesque deformity, and sublime abstraction.
Wang Keping is supported by 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong.
For more information, please read the "Wang Keping" press release.
" Beijing-via-Paris sculptor Wang Keping works exclusively in heavy and deep woods, funneling prehistoric, religious, and tribal forms into modernist abstractions of eroticism, fertility, and physicality.”
—Smart Beijing