Wang Keping is recognized internationally and has been collected and exhibited at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the M+ Uli Sigg Collection, Hong Kong; the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, among others.

Bird remains very special to the artist, allowing him to work with such simple shapes, almost a swirl of movement creating an undefined formation within space. Wang says, “My birds are not really birds,” a notion that is not hard to grasp as they are somewhere in between reality and otherness. Wang’s work has evolved over the last 40 years to incorporate a lifetime of his collaboration with wood, nature and his simplified creatural sculptures. His bird sculptures are yet another way to express his meaning. His truth is somewhere in the core of our humanity and it is there inside the wood waiting for him to bring it out. The strength is the way he pulls all of these aspects together and Wang Keping does it with such poignancy and honesty that we are drawn to his works because they exude the joy of what art can give to all of us, truth and beauty.

Wang Keping’s birds are just one of his main themes, along with women, men, mother holding child, couples and abstract works he terms “ex-voto.” Ever present around him in his atelier he observes the birds as the harmony of the forest but he observes them in relation to the trees and their branches that also resemble the figure of a bird. Like all of his works the object he sculpts is less important than the form that emerges from it.

The subject is an excuse to get to the essence of what truth and beauty he is looking for inside the block of wood. The final image is an abstraction of the idea. And through the process, all the natural elements of the wood become important. The natural knot might be in the middle, and the artist will cut a curve into the work around it incorporating the swirl of a beak. The grain might allow the flowing of the neck or even create a pattern that resembles feathers. The cracks might create an even blanket on the work that etch a circular pattern. The wood might be a flowing river of natural bumps and contours; he appreciates their ability to add certain feelings and textures to the piece and he consciously incorporates them into the sculpture itself. All of these refined aspects of the wood are thought about and employed. He knows all the intricacies of the different trees he works with and the characteristics they will give. From the beginning, it is a minimum of two to three years before it is finished. He is patient and a perfectionist.