Wang Keping Chain

PRESENTER:

This striking sculpture in wood is by Wang Keping. He was one of the founding members of the remarkable Stars Art Group; an avant-garde group of self-taught Chinese artists working in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The piece, with the strong, bold symbolism of the fist, speaks directly to their spirit of self-expression in the relatively open atmosphere after the end of Cultural Revolution.   

Liu Heung Shing is a photojournalist and was one of the first eight American reporters sent to Beijing in 1978 to cover the shifting landscape.  

LIU HEUNG SHING: 

China decided in November of 1978 to launch a full-scale economic reform. And this is a very fortuitous time, there was a general relaxation across the board: socially, culturally artistically, so that significance could never be understated because the impact was absolutely sweeping across the whole of China in every aspect. 

PRESENTER:

As Chinese society opened up, collectives like the Stars Art Group began to make increasingly public statements on the freedom of art. Through his reporting, Liu Heung Shing came to know members of the group well, and we asked him how he saw the movement looking back.  

LIU HEUNG SHING: 

I would encourage everyone to look at this phenomenon to be a reflection of what was happening in China across the board, because change was starting to, to happen in literature, poetry, art, sculpture, painting, woodcutting, photography. You know, I think that the significance of Stars [Art] Group was saying to the society overall, say, ‘listen to us, look at us, see what we do, what we wanted to do’. 

And this is something almost unheard of in People's Republic of China, because until then they probably had never seen a foreign journalist. They never realized there were people who were interested in their story and interested in their personal stories no less. So, you can sense that the Stars [Art] Group, like a lot of intellectual writers, story tellers and so on, are beginning to, to kind of slowly kind of peer through this artificial wall around them, that was set up by the system. 

NARRATOR:

Titled Chain, this wooden sculpture was made by Wang Keping in 1979. It is fifty-three centimetres tall, thirty-seven centimetres wide, and about thirteen centimetres thick. The height and width of the sculpture roughly correspond to the dimensions of an adult torso.

The sculpture is a relatively abstract representation of a human head. The face is turned to the left, with a hand wrapped around the mouth and lower jaw. The head tilts backward and the eyes are wide open. An interlocking chain coils around its straight neck.

The form of the sculpture also resembles intertwined hands. Imagine clenching your left hand into a fist, palm facing forward away from you. Then imagine placing the palm of your right hand against the palm of your left, and wrap your four fingers around to the front, covering your wrist and part of the back of your hand, which faces you. The covered area corresponds to the sculpture’s mouth and jaw, while the exposed knuckle of your left little finger represents the sculpture’s nose. Just below the index and middle fingers of your left hand is a large, carved, olive -shaped eye. The wrist of the left hand is the sculpture’s neck, which is engraved with a chain.

The sculpture is dark brown with a smooth wood grain that has a pattern resembling undulating mountains. The curvature of the eye, and the outlines of the hand, fingers, and fingernails, are intricately carved into the wood. In contrast, the chain around the neck is slightly raised, like a bas-relief.