Wang Keping – Duets

Exhibition until March 17, 2024 at the Domaine National de Chambord

The artist

Born in 1949 near Beijing, Wang Keping is one of the greatest living Chinese artists. Tempted for a time by the theater, the young Keping turned towards sculpture at the end of the 70s and became a member of the “Etoiles” group which burst onto the international artistic scene in 1979, during an exhibition which marked, in fact, the creation of the first artistic avant-garde movement born under the People's Republic of China. Standard bearer of these young freedom-loving artists, Wang Keping creates with Silence an emblematic sculpture of opposition to censorship, whose New York Times made its headlines a few days after the exhibition was banned by the government. Married to a French teacher, the artist waited more than 3 years before being able to return to Paris in 1984. Two years later he began a collaboration with the Zürcher gallery which would last 30 years.

Several monumental sculptures were installed during the 90s in France, the United States, and Germany, but above all it was the presentation of Spectators, for the “Champs Elysées de la sculpture”, in 2000, which launched Wang Keping's career: major group exhibitions followed one another, until the monograph from the Shenzhen museum, in 2009, which presented nearly three decades of work . The following years saw several French museums offer personal exhibitions to the artist: Zadkine (2010), Cernuschi (2011), Carmignac (2018), Rodin and Guimet (2022), while a first retrospective was organized in Beijing in 2013 and one of his works was purchased in 2016 by the MNAM.

Heir to the long tradition of direct carving sculpture, which has become quite rare today, Wang Keping is one of the last virtuosos of a technique which allows him to work with an exceptional variety of tree species (ash, acacia, cherry). , willows, weeping trees, cypresses, plane trees, etc.). Borrowing from various primitive arts as well as traditional Chinese sculpture or Brancusi, he favors ample, generous shapes, capable of emphasizing the generative vigor of the material.