Wang KEPING

Chinese artist WANG Keping began sculpting wood as a self-taught artist in the late 1970s, after having been, during the Cultural Revolution, successively a peasant, worker, then actor and screenwriter for national TV. During the Beijing Spring, he participated in the Democracy Wall and in 1979, he organized the first unofficial art exhibition ever held in China on the gates of the Beijing Museum of Fine Arts with the group of artists the Stars (Xingxing / 星 星).
There, he hung his manifesto sculpture Silence, depicting a face/mask with the right eye closed and the mouth blocked, to express the lack of freedom of expression and 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 in France in the 1980s, he developed a very free practice of wood sculpture, in relation to Chinese artistic traditions and those of the Cultural Revolution. In France, WANG Keping abandoned political themes in favor of the figuration of the female body, embracing couples, and more rarely birds. Starting from trunks fallen in the forest as well as branches brought back to the studio, he works with a chainsaw, blowtorch and carpenter's chisel. Since then, in France, his adopted country, he has created a work internationally recognized as one of the strongest and most original contributions to contemporary sculpture.

It was in the spring of 2021 that Wang Keping began his first collaboration with the 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, during Private Choice, the gallery will unveil a second jewel-sculpture made of blackened silver.