2023-12-30 15:00:15
The sculptor Wang Keping, in residence at the Château de Chambord (Loir-et-Cher), October 11, 2023. AURÉLIEN MOLE
On the morning of September 27, 1979, several young artists who called themselves Les Etoiles displayed their works along the railings of the China Museum of Fine Arts, in the center of Beijing. Their action is clandestine, having been neither announced nor authorized. The news spread very quickly, spectators gathered, correspondents from the foreign press arrived and, naturally, the police and representatives of the Communist Party.
Read the story (in 2019): Article reserved for our subscribers Les Etoiles, dissident movement in contemporary Chinese art
Contrary to what the artists expected, they were not immediately arrested. The works are confiscated but not destroyed. First placed inside the museum, they were even re-exhibited a few weeks later. One of them is a carved wood entitled Silence of a certain Wang Keping: a head with a mouth obstructed by a sort of gag and an obstructed eye. The political meaning is supported, as is that of the second work by the same artist: The Idol brings together the iconography of the Buddha and that of Chairman Mao. On October 20, Silence made the front page of New York Times, which makes it a historic work, since then reproduced many times. But rarely exhibited.
We are therefore surprised to discover it, in the company of The Idol, in a room of the Château de Chambord (Loir-et-Cher). For his “Duets” exhibition, the artist agreed to reform the pair from 1979. It took, they say, courage, anger and a remarkable disregard for risk to dare to exhibit them like this at the end of the 1970s. It also required a rare predisposition for working with wood.
Read the review: Article reserved for our subscribers At the National Museum of Asian Arts Guimet, in Paris, Wang Keping works wood in his flesh
Wang Keping, born in 1949 into a literate family and who had previously been an actor and screenwriter for television, began his studies in 1978 as an autodidact, outside of any official socialist realist teaching. However, the mastery of the material and the art of playing with the volumes and grains of the surfaces were already obvious in 1979, as they are in the twenty other works today distributed in the spaces on either side of the extremely famous double staircase of Chambord.
Ubiquitous human anatomy
Some date from the 1990s, others are very recent. Some are monumental, others much smaller in size. Some have black patinas obtained by burning, others tend to resemble old leather or rusty stone. They are made of cypress, mahogany, acacia or cherry. But, whatever these differences and the specificities of the essences, all these sculptures are born from the same creative process.
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