Wang Keping at work on his sculptures in the garden of the Musee Rodin until June 5th

Dear Shaded Viewers,

For four afternoons each week, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday you can experience something so peaceful and beautiful that you just might feel you’ve landed in heaven. The Chinese artist, Wang Keping has been based in France since 1984. He credits Rodin as being the first artist to make him understand that a sculptor was an artist. Keping works directly on whole tree trunks, from which he creates sensual forms full of emotion and poetry. He is the first artist that the Rodin Museum has given the opportunity to use their garden like their own atelier and to work under the eyes of the public. Keping was born in Beijing into a family of scholars and experienced the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution. As he is self-taught he invented his very own technique.

In 1979 he participated in the creation of the dissident artists’ group “Stars” in China and faced political censorship and deprivation of freedom before going into exile in France. Wood is the heart of his work and Keping scours landscapes and sawmills in search of trunks of different species. The block of wood suggests the shapes that he will take with the help of his chainsaw and fine tools, he makes the wood speak. Just walking through the garden and looking at his art is a meditation in itself. He sands and re-sands the wood until the right shape emerges and reveals the soul that the material imposes: rounded, soft, sensual feminine shapes, smooth as skin and he encourages you to touch it.

The celebration of women in Rodin’s work left a deep imprint on his creative journey, guiding his head and hands from conception to completion. He has collected images of the work of Rodin from 1978 to the present day from the images printed in Beijing to the Rodin Museum in Paris.

“L’Amour des Forêts” is one of his finished works that is on display in the main lobby of the Hôtel Biron which houses the Musee Rodin.

A visit is highly recommended, I for one will surely return several times over the next weeks.

musee-rodin.fr