Newman Huo

    WANG KEPING, one of the most important artists from the experimental Stars Group, is displaying 45 wooden and bronze sculptures he created from 1979 through 2006 at a one-man art exhibition in the He Xiangning Art Museum.

    This is the first time the Chinese artist has shown his works on the Chinese mainland after he emmigrated to France in 1984.

    This exhibition is part of a series of art exhibitions organized by the He Xiangning Art Museum, beginning with Huang Rui’s and Zhao Gang’s exhibitions in 2007.

    Like Wang, Huang and Zhao are also two representative artists from the Stars Group that was formed in Beijing in 1979, when China began to implement reforms and opening up policies.

    According to the organizer, Feng Boyi, the art exhibitions were aimed at helping art lovers in Shenzhen to better understand the development of contemporary Chinese art over the past three decades.

    Born in 1949, Wang began teaching himself sculpture for financial reasons in 1978 when he noticed one of his friends had bought a cassette player with the proceeds from selling works of art, such as paintings and sculptures.

    His first sculpture was made from a piece of wood, the crosspiece of a broken chair he picked up on the street.

    Out of the crosspiece, he carved the bust of a man with a twisted face, with an outstretched arm holding a little red book.

    The work marked the start of a passionate career for Wang. With a style totally different from sculptures of socialist realism which were dominant during the “Cultural Revolution” from 1966 to 1976, the sculpture was later collected by the Fukuoka Museum in Japan.

    A self-taught artist, Wang is particularly good at representing beauty with simple forms in his wooden sculptures.

    With the Taoist philosophy as the principle for his creations, Wang regards his work as a kind of intimate collaboration between himself and nature, trying his best to let the wood speak for itself through natural forms and textures.

    “The wood can be hard or soft, but I follow the will of the wood to let it tell me the direction it wants me to go,” said Wang.

    While living abroad, Wang has used in his sculptures a wide range of hard woods from France, such as maple, walnut, wild cherry and oak.

    It is in the words of Michael Sullivan, a leading Chinese art scholar at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford University in Oxford, England, that Wang’s works are best described.

    “It is rare nowadays that a work of contemporary art can be understood or appreciated without a good deal of explanation by the artist and commentary by the critics,” Sullivan said in an article. “That is, in fact, the weakness of much so-called conceptual art. It cannot speak for itself, because the meaning is in the ‘idea’ — and ideas are easy to come by — and not in the form,” he said.

    “So it is a profound relief to turn to the work of Wang Keping. He likes to talk about his work, to share his thoughts with others, for that is part of his generous nature,” he said. “But in fact his work needs no explanation; still less does it need theoretical analysis. If ever form spoke directly to the eye of the viewer, it is here,”