Wang Keping, a wood carver, was bom at a sma1l town of Hebei Sheng around Beijing with an artistic gift from his parents in 1949. But he had to waste his high school days in a period of Great Cultural Revolution.
Then he endeavored to be a writer or film star that he had wanted to be, but he suffered from pang not to select such a job by dint of his rebellious character against Communist system owing to Great Cultural Revolution.
As an altemative, he began to paint according to a suggestion by a painter friend, with which he could not be also satisfied, and finally determined to be a sculptor. But whereas painting has a long history in China, sculpture does not. Thus what he sculpts for himself is rather a rational truth more or less. For other sculptors at that time had to trod a road of self-education like him.
Theme of his initial sculptures was of rebellion or ridicule against political system without exemption. That is, in the initial sculptures such as Silence, Chain, Idol, Fanatic, etc., he expressed the attack towards Mao Zedong or Chinese people’s appearance suffering from Communist regime metaphorically.
By the way, it ostensibly seemed to live the artists freedom of creation since Great Cultural Revolution, but virtually rather strengthened control and surveillance. Artists revoltδd against such an artistic, political establishment of Chinese govemrnent. It was a crisis of Tiananmun. The group that guided them in this protest was very ‘Xing Xing Art Group'. In a demonstration by that group members that compared themselves to an endlessly glittering star, Wang Keping was one of leading persons.
They were extremely regulated by the government in the freedom of creation. With three group exhibitions, they not only exploited a road to their own autonomous growth, but guided to a road enough to create and display avant-garde art to young artists.
Since then, there was a wave of liberation for a moment, but the government’s suppression was more extreme. As a result, some artists and intellectuals was sent to prison, and he searched for a political asylum with intemational marriage along with other artists.
After getting married with a French lady, and defected to France, Wang Keping' s art world reached a tuming point. That is a very transition from the representation of political satire to human body, in particular, to that of pure beauty in female body.
And after his defection he concentrated much concem on a medium of tree. In fact, he had showed much concem on tree from the beginning of wood carving in China, it was hard to get timber for carving owing to deforestation since the foundation of China. But the abundant timbers in France served for blooming his artistic inspiration.
He began to regard tree as organic body. Thus he did not treat carelessly any of trunk, twig, growth ring, knot, etc. that each tree has. He awakened that they harmonize one another in order to create a tree, and a beaut표버 woman’s body that he wants to represent is formed by their combination. That is, he, 파‘e a Neo-platonist, believed that an idea of a beautiful woman is incamated through a material of tree. It was a reason that he implants woman’s body and tree with life, energy, germination and growth simultaneously.
Wang Keping' s philosophy of art started with philanthropy. With an eyewitness that Chinese leaders exerted suppression and surveillance over people in a period of Great Cultural Revolution, his philosophy of philanthropy was germinated. It was a result of far-reaching love towards China. He searched for love towards China from not only such love towards human-being, but 려so that towards tradition of culture and art. But that love was not wide-spread nor comprehensive, rather it was only selected in accordance with his artistic idea. What he preferred to Taoism or Zen Buddhism was not to believe therr~ but to incite only parts harmonized with his own among id않 or spirit contained within them. And it was in this context that he enumerated the sculptures in Han Dynasty or the 따t of Qui Baishi.
Additionally, the reason that he accepted philosophy or technique of Brancusi or Zadkine that he found from the history of Westem art was in that they preferred to represent the essenæ of life and on the contrary omitted the trivial things.
In conclusion, the plastic language displayed in Wang Keping’s wood sculpture is typicallly of Taoistic character, which discloses his Taoistic philosophy of nature and world, and belongs to a comprehensive concept containing the philanthropic. That is, in that he discusses and represents the essential relationship between his own free, quiet life and art, female body and tree, the world of his sculptw~e is called Taoistic, Zen Buddhistic.