Wang Keping is a contemporary Chinese sculptor, born in Beijing in 1949. Wood is one of his favorite materials.

He is one of the pillars of Chinese contemporary art, thanks to the key role he played in the Chinese artistic avant-garde in the 1970s. Since then, he has developed a virtuoso body of work that explores all the possibilities of wood and is internationally recognized as one of the most important contributions to contemporary sculpture.

His exceptional body of work bears witness to the importance he attaches to working with matter, a humble, intimate and spiritual relationship to sculpture that he defines as follows: "I am a sculptor and I sand with my hands". Wang Keping captures the quintessence of his subjects through his mastery of traditional carving techniques, with a timeless approach that transcends any notion of style. A whole range of themes representative of the artist's work are on display: busts of women, couples, embraces, hybrid animals...

Wang Keping made his debut on the art scene in 1979, when he founded the dissident group "Xing Xing" (literally "Stars") with now-recognized artists Ai Weiwei, Ma Desheng and Huang Rui. This avant-garde movement asserted itself against the socialist realism imposed by the Communist Party, with a first manifesto exhibition on the gates of Beijing's National Museum of Fine Arts.

Since his arrival in France in 1984, Wang Keping has distanced himself from this early commitment and gradually turned to a more universal art form, based mainly on the carving of wood, a living material whose expressive power he never ceases to reveal. This work embraces and sublimates the properties of the wood the artist selects, in an aesthetic and spiritual quest inspired by Taoist philosophy, the ancient statuary of the Han dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD) and the folk art of the Chinese countryside. Indeed, it is from the veins, knots and cracks, from the more or less uneven surface of the pieces of wood, that the artist draws the essential shapes of his subjects. Each piece is carefully chosen and respected in its integrity. This primordial relationship with nature, the primary source of inspiration and formal matrix, is also evident in the care Wang Keping lavishes on the surface of his works. The sculptures are first polished to remove tool marks and leave only the relief inherent in the material visible, then burned with a blowtorch with extreme care, to obtain a final hue unique to each sculpture.