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WANG KEPING: Metamorphoses

Evoking some archaic goddesses from the depths of time, Wang Keping ‘s monumental wooden sculptures fascinate by their density and sensuality. Maternity, Origin of the World, Cyclops Woman… half-figure, half-totem, they appear frozen in their metamorphoses, suspended between form and formlessness, incarnation and abstraction… Carved in hundred-year-old trees, these hieratic figures seem to come from a concretion of time but also contain in the fullness of their round forms and their voluptuous swirls petrified streams of sap still throbbing with life… Calling for a caress, they conceal in the perfection of their smooth and shiny surfaces all the imperfections of the wood of which the Chinese artist has made himself the singer: revealing its asperities (veins, knots, hollows…) with the flame of the blowtorch, before sanding it to reveal its “soul,” he “listens to the language of wood”; it is he who imposes his form and his constraints.

Exhibition Metamorphoses
Until March 12, 2022 
Galerie Nathalie Obadia
91, rue du Fg St-Honoré, Paris VIII
www.nathalieobadia.com

Open air workshop in the gardens of the Rodin Museum
77, rue de Varenne, Paris VII
www.musee-rodin.fr
From May 2 to June 5

Carte blanche at the Musée Guimet
Musée national des Arts asiatiques Guimet
6, place d’Iéna, Paris XVI
www.guimet.fr 
From November 23 to March 6, 2023

Publication Wang Keping by Flammarion (49 €)

Stéphanie Dulout