Wang Keping

Chinese artist WANG Keping began carving wood as a self-taught artist in the late 1970s, after having worked as a peasant, a worker and then as an actor and scriptwriter for national TV during the Cultural Revolution. During the Beijing Spring, he took part in the Democracy Wall and, in 1979, organized the first unofficial art exhibition ever held in China on the gates of the Beijing Fine Arts Museum with the artist group Les Etoiles (Xingxing / 星 星).
There, he hangs his manifesto sculpture Silence, featuring a face/mask with its right eye closed and mouth plugged, to express the lack of freedom of expression and censorship in place.
In this way, the sculptor placed himself at the cutting edge of the national artistic avant-garde, while at the same time embodying opposition to the post-Mao communist regime. Exiled to France in the 1980s, he developed a free-flowing practice of wood sculpture, drawing on both Chinese artistic traditions and those of the Cultural Revolution. In France, WANG Keping moved away from political themes, preferring to depict female bodies, embracing couples and, more rarely, birds. Starting with fallen logs in the forest and branches brought back to the studio, he works with chainsaws, blowtorches and carpenter's chisels. Since then, in France, his host country, he has created a body of work internationally recognized as one of the strongest and most original contributions to contemporary sculpture.

In spring 2021, Wang Keping begins his first collaboration with MiniMasterpiece gallery. The "Eclipse" jewel-sculpture, 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 in blackened silver.