The 16th contemporary carte blanche of the National Museum of Asian Arts – Guimet has been entrusted to the Chinese artist Wang Keping, who takes over the rotunda on the 4th floor and the Chinese permanent collections. 21 sculptures in wood or bronze establish a dialogue with the millennial works of the museum.

Born in 1949 near Beijing, Wang Keping is one of the founders of contemporary Chinese art, notably because of the key role he played in the Chinese artistic avant-garde during the 1970s and his belonging to the movement of the stars. Leaving China and settling in France in 1984, he found himself freed from the weight of censorship; sculpture then imposes itself as a language to invent, building a resolutely personal path, without staging its Chinese heritage. He has since developed a virtuoso work that explores all the possibilities of wood, internationally recognized as one of the most important contributions to contemporary sculpture.

To achieve purity, Wang Keping lets himself be guided above all by nature. From melee with wood will arise essential forms constitutive of his work: femininity, animality, the couple, desire, suffering and finitude. The artist seeks to “restore life, love, feelings and softness to wood”. In his own words: “Trees are like human bodies, with hard parts like bones, soft parts like flesh, sometimes tough, sometimes fragile. I cannot go against them. »

For the MNAAG, Wang Keping chose, for the first time, to work on an exotic essence. The density and size of the mahogany forks challenged him to invent a new way of listening, new gestures. Wang Keping works with patience to free forms and sublimate them. He seeks in this new wooden flesh to be even simpler, more essential: two curves suggest a chest, a delicate neck is revealed on the side to suggest femininity. Like the calligrapher he was, he establishes a subtle dialogue between volume and line, emptiness and fullness. The work on the patina has also been adjusted: once calcined and given a patina by the black of the coal, the raw pale pink material reveals dark reds and sublimates the grain of the wood. The final polishing allows the work to capture the light,

Wang Keping's works are presented in the rotunda on the 4th floor, in the Chinese archeology room on the 1st floor and on the so-called “bird” landing, in dialogue with the museum's collections. The artist, recognized internationally for his singular sculptural language, offers visitors his vision of harmony with nature in respect of Taoist philosophy, showing works of universal character: women and birds express in turn sensuality, eroticism, fertility, masculine and feminine.

Curators
Yannick Lintz, general heritage curator, general curator
Aline Wang, studio manager of Wang Keping
Claire Bettinelli, production manager for contemporary exhibitions and collections