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| Artist's Statement |
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Xing Ping
A Woman is the incarnation of beauty
A Divinity is the aspiration of the soul
A Goddess reunites feminity and divinity
To touch a sculpted woman
is not to caress a woman
To sculpt a woman
is not to recreate a woman
It’s more to materialise the feminity
and to feel the presence of the divinity
-Wang Keping
Printemps 2001 |
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| Articles |
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Some thoughts about Wang Keping
When, in the autumn of 1979, the amateur sculptor Wang Keping and his friends in the dissident Stars group, in heroic defiance of authority, hung their work on the railings of the Beihai Park in Beijing no one, least of all Wang Keping himself, could have imagined that, twenty years later, his monumental sculpture would be displayed on the Champs-Elysees in company with the work of other leading sculptors from around the world. How did it happen?
A year after the Stars’ first ground-breaking exhibition they were allowed a show at the National Art Gallery, the authorities convinced that they would be humiliated by its failure, and mend their ways. In fact, the exhibition drew such crowds that they were not allowed to show again. The Stars dissolved, and several of their leaders found refuge, and freedom, abroad. In the meantime, Wang Keping had taken my wife Khoan and me to see his “studio”, a small room filled to the ceiling with pieces carved from any pieces or lumps of wood he could scrounge. We were astonished by so much energy packed into a small room, by his passionate dedication to sculptural form, by his sense of fun. It was an exhilarating moment.
Wang Keping wrote how difficult it was, after moving to the West, to gain any kind of foothold in the art world. In China, he and his friends had been, as he put it, : “centre stage”; now, they were “in the audience, watching the show”. The temptation to attract attention by making his work more “Chinese”, or by following current art fashions, was great. But Wang Keping--and this is one of his most admirable qualities--never succumbed to such inducements. He never compromised. As a result, his road to recognition was long and hard.
But is has come. Quite unspoilt, unchanged - in fact deeper and more mature, - is his instinctive feeling for sculptural form so powerful that his figures seem almost to burst through their skin, enlivened by his optimism, his sheer joie-de-vivre. We look at his work and feel, “here is a happy man, at peace with himself and the world”, and he makes us feel good. No longer in the audience watching the show, he has once more become part of it.
Michael Sullivan
Oxford, April, 2001 |
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