Wang Keping

The Chinese artist WANG Keping began carving wood as a self-taught artist at the end of the 1970s, after having been, during the Cultural Revolution, successively, a peasant, a worker, then an actor and a scriptwriter for the national TV. During the Beijing Spring, he participated in the Democracy Wall and organized in 1979, the first unofficial art exhibition ever held in China on the gates of the Beijing Museum of Fine Arts with the artist group the Stars (Xingxing / 星 星).
There, he hung his manifesto sculpture Silence, featuring a face/masque with its right eye closed and its mouth plugged, to express the lack of freedom of expression and the censorship in place.
Thus, the sculptor placed himself at the forefront of the national artistic avant-garde while embodying the opposition to the post-Mao communist regime. Exiled to France in the 1980s, he developed a very free practice of woodcarving, with regard to Chinese artistic traditions and those of the Cultural Revolution. In France, WANG Keping has abandoned political themes in favor of the representation of female bodies, embracing couples, and more rarely birds. Starting with trunks fallen in the forest as well as branches brought back to the studio, he works with a chainsaw, a blowtorch and a carpenter’s chisel. Since then, in France, his host country, he has created a body of work that is internationally recognized as one of the strongest and most original contributions to contemporary sculpture.

In the spring of 2021, Wang Keping will begin his first collaboration with the MiniMasterpiece gallery. The sculpture-jewel “Eclipse”, in ebony and 18k yellow gold, is signed and numbered, and accompanied by a certificate from the artist. In October, on the occasion of Private Choice, the gallery will unveil a second jewel-sculpture made of blackened silver.