Wang Keping, 70, Has Carved Wood for 40 Years — the Piece That Caused a Sensation Came in 1979 | Remembering the Stars Art Exhibition, Part 3

We interviewed five people who lived through the Stars Art Exhibition. Their stories carry the marks of their era, and each is deeply personal.

In 1979, more than twenty amateur painters in Beijing launched a grassroots art exhibition and named it "Stars." It began in the open air, then moved into the official National Art Museum of China. Visitors came from all over the country, and it caused a sensation.

After the long years in which art and literature served politics, people were astonished by the Stars artists' self-expression. They painted portraits of ordinary people and ordinary scenes, in a manner that was not especially realistic. Only a few works carried an obvious critical edge.

The Stars Art Exhibition was held twice. Judgments of it split two ways. Some art historians hold that Stars announced the emergence of avant-garde art in China after the Cultural Revolution. Others hold that the works weren't contemporary enough — that by the standards of the world's art scene the pieces on show were naive — and that the Stars artists produced no lasting influence.

Still, the Stars Art Exhibition did turn out to be a prelude to China's new art market.

Looking back today at an exhibition held 40 years ago, its meaning reaches past the art world. What matters is how, in a time of sweeping change, young people took part in it and fought for the chance to speak. We interviewed five people who lived through the Stars Art Exhibition. Their stories carry the marks of their era, and each is deeply personal.

This is the third piece in the series.

The work most often mentioned from the Stars Art Exhibition is a set of wood carvings. Silence is a head 43 centimeters tall, carved from birch. The face is contorted, the features rough. A round object plugs the mouth and stretches it grotesquely wide, and the left eye is sealed shut as well. Idol was modeled on the head of Chairman Mao, but the shape of the wood forced the face into an elongation that turns it into a joke. In 1979, when these pieces hung in the open-air garden outside the National Art Museum of China, or were shown in the museum's Huafangzhai hall, what they meant was something people "understood at a glance."

Wang Keping, now 70, made them. Forty years ago he appeared on the front page of The New York Times of October 19, 1979, holding Silence.

In a different setting, Wang Keping would have made a natural contemporary artist. He is alert to shifts in the social mood, and blunt and bold in expressing himself. He began carving in 1978 with a discarded hardwood chair leg and finished his first piece, Long Live: he tried — only tried — to cut a face into the base of the wood, mouth open wide, the expression pained, one arm raised, a Little Red Book gripped in its hand.

His technique was not realistic at all, which struck people then as strikingly new. For a while it drew students from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) to seek him out, and it prodded the other Stars members. Huang Rui, the exhibition's main organizer, said Wang Keping's work "made him think harder about how urgently he needed to innovate in his own work." Huang Rui was then working hard at imitating Cézanne. Wang Keping had no formal training, had never seen a Western art book, and had not even heard of Matisse.

Wang Keping is showy by nature — another Stars member, Li Yongcun, called him a man who "doesn't give a damn about anything," the kind of trait that breeds anecdotes around an artist. The AP photographer Liu Heung Shing once shot him in his studio in the pose of a reclining Buddha, wood carvings piled around him, looking into the lens with real assurance, like a star. That probably has something to do with his years acting in a theater troupe. He likes to talk about sex and women, with no filter at all. After the exhibition the Stars members came to know a good many foreigners, and Wang Keping was the keenest of them: Li Shuang, another member, said he particularly liked "pleasing foreign women."

But none of these traits goes all the way down. In 1987 Wang Keping wrote a short stage play, Male Artist and Female Art, drawn from a 1985 visit to a New York exhibition with the artist Ai Weiwei — the performance artist Linda Montano, then active, was exhibiting herself inside a small hut in the museum. In the script Wang Keping made himself a male artist who appears to hold nothing sacred and is in fact something of a poser. Set against how often he brings up the sexual repression of his generation, the attitude rings true.

The American art dealer Katie de Tilly has known Wang Keping since 1997, and later represented his work at her Hong Kong gallery, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery. In a 2008 essay she described him as "silent and suspicious," "outwardly simple and friendly," but in truth "aloof and self-admiring." She put it exactly: "Like many of that generation, the Cultural Revolution left its mark on them." They fight the mark and give it away at the same time.

Wang Keping married his French wife in 1982 but did not get a passport to leave until 1984, when the two of them moved to France together. There he went on carving. His subject became women, and his handling grew simpler and more natural. Not many people paid attention, and some critics noted that he had lost his earlier political sensitivity — that the carving now looked more like habit than anything else. At a conversation this past March at the China Club in Hong Kong, a curator asked him why his sculpture had changed so little over the years. He said, half joking, that it sold well, so he kept doing it. In our interview he added that he thinks he has found his own language, unlike anyone else's, and is still developing it; there is no need to change direction.

Several Stars members, asked about Wang Keping, all called him "a real artist" — "he actually makes art." About ten years ago he was out driving one afternoon to look for wood when he crashed, broke seven ribs and nearly died. After a short recovery he went straight back to hunting for suitable timber, back to the studio in plain work clothes, knife in hand, cutting out the shape, then setting it aside for the wood to dry and crack — a few months, sometimes a year or two — before returning to revise and finish it.

He takes no assistant, works without stopping, and has filled the studio to bursting. But he always makes fast and sells little. "Ai Weiwei came to the studio in Paris once and said my daughter would be very rich one day — meaning I might never see daylight in this lifetime," Wang Keping said at the opening of his 2013 solo show at UCCA in Beijing. It was his first solo exhibition on the Chinese mainland since he left the country. As he remembers it, "the art critics thought it wasn't contemporary enough," which he puts down to his having "never gone in for installation or concept art."

We met Wang Keping in Hong Kong this past March. He does not think of himself as a sought-after artist, but he turns overconfident the moment he talks about his work. He often speaks without restraint. Of the people who date the beginning of Chinese contemporary art to the '85 New Wave rather than to Stars, he said they were "distorting history." He dislikes the political pop and "Chinese elements" now in fashion, which he considers another modish form of "official art." Meeting a former Christie's employee for the first time, he told her flatly, "You people are the ones who made a mess of Chinese contemporary art."

After 35 years in France, Wang Keping's French is still not good. He rarely talks about his life in Paris. In the early days his father opposed his going abroad, believing he held naive ideas about the West. Looking back, the father got some of it right. France's loose immigration policy left Wang Keping worried about safety in his neighborhood, and he has had to move often because of it. He also hates how readily the French strike. When he first arrived, a gallery cheated him. He finds the French tax system complicated and dealing with galleries in several countries more trouble than it is worth; two years ago his daughter took over those matters.

Because he started out as a screenwriter, Wang Keping tells a story well. He remembers a great many details and knows how to carry emotion. He may also, without meaning to, touch up the facts.

What follows is his account, in his own words:

I said I made it myself. They all said it was impossible.

In the summer of 1979, Qu Leilei heard I was carving and came to the troupe to find me. We had never met. He worked at China Central Television and I was at the Central Broadcasting and Television Drama Troupe; our two buildings almost touched.

I started at the troupe as an actor, then moved to the writing and directing group, where you didn't have to show up for work — you only came in on the 4th of each month to collect your pay. That's why people called it "Broadcasting Paradise." Before I left the country an American reporter asked me where I found the time to carve. I said I don't sit in an office, I do it at home every day. He said, "A job like yours doesn't exist in the West." Even when we did go in, though, we had no offices — there was only a room for meetings.

Qu Leilei kept missing me. On the 4th he came and called for me in the corridor again. I saw it was a man, asked what he wanted, and he said, I hear you do wood carving. I said, don't shout — nobody here knows I do wood carving. He said, could I have a look? We're putting on an exhibition, an amateur art exhibition. I thought, fine, I've never had a chance to exhibit either.

Nobody had much ambition about exhibitions then. There wasn't a single gallery in Beijing and no art market at all. Official artists had to complete the assignments handed down to them — for something like the National Art Exhibition you submitted a work, or you sent pieces to newspapers and publishers. Some older painters sold their paintings to Huafangzhai, or to tourism agencies. Ordinary artists just painted for themselves. Most young artists had no chance of exhibiting at all.

I gave him my address and we fixed a time. There were no telephones then. At the hour we had agreed, I waited at home.

I remember Ma Desheng, Huang Rui and Qu Leilei coming in. My room was tiny, eight square meters, at Houmen Bridge near Di'anmen, in the China Drama Theatre dormitory. Huang Rui behaved like a leader — very serious, saying nothing. I thought, do they like it or not? Maybe they look down on what I've made.

When he had finished looking, Huang Rui drew a breath and said, this exhibition of ours is going to cause a sensation. Then I knew they had agreed to let me in. "Keping, come to our meetings from now on. You count as one of the core members."

The meetings were held in the small courtyard at Huang Rui's place — really it was everyone sitting around talking. We didn't formally select works either; you brought whatever you wanted.

At Huang Rui's they were passing around a book of Matisse's paintings. I looked at the name and asked, is he Chinese? How have I never heard of him? Huang Rui said, you don't even know Matisse — you're a disgrace to Stars. Later Bai Jingzhou, the troupe's scenic artist, told me about some painters, but I could never remember the names. I liked Brancusi very much; to me his sculptures weren't abstract, they were simple.

Unlike Huang Rui, Ma Desheng and Bo Yun, I'd had almost no contact with the art world. That was how artists worked then: state education, and the state assigns you a work unit — a school, a publisher, a theater troupe, a magazine — and you go to work there. If you hadn't studied art formally, you were called an amateur artist. I wasn't even that. I was messing about on my own, and it happened to come out right.

As a child I lived alongside Ai Xuan — Ai Weiwei's older brother. After Ai Qing and Wei Ying divorced, they lived in Tianjin, in our building, two meters away, door facing door. Ai Xuan painted like a prodigy: a few quick strokes and there was a horse. I'd stand there gaping like an idiot, thinking, this is something.

So I told my father I wanted to paint too. My father was pleased — his son had an interest in art. One day he brought out several thick volumes of The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting for me to copy from; he'd bought the best edition at Rongbaozhai. After two days I stopped. I simply couldn't do it — no patience for it, no gift for it. My father said, this boy of mine will never amount to anything.

Getting into sculpture was pure chance. At the end of 1978 I picked up a hardwood chair leg in the street, took it home and cut at it with a small knife. Wood was a state-controlled commodity then, under unified purchase and sale; there was nowhere to buy it. But Beijing burned coal and needed kindling. Every household had a coal ration book, good for a fixed monthly quota of coal and firewood. The state hauled large logs to the firewood mills to be split into small pieces. Some pieces wouldn't split and got thrown aside; later I went and asked for those.

I had to work out the whole carving process myself. The wood starts out pale and untreated, and scorching it with fire was my own invention. At first I didn't scorch it, I colored it, and coloring it never looked good however I did it. Idol was painted red at the time, though there was no good red paint to be had.

Before the exhibition I was already sure my carvings would cause a sensation. I had shown them to friends. Zhang Zhizhong taught art at the Beijing Language Institute and knew many foreign students, teaching them calligraphy and painting. When foreign students went home they'd trade their tape recorders for art. I invited him over, hoping to trade for a recorder myself. He looked at my carvings and was astonished, and asked who had given them to me. I said I made them. He said, impossible — an ordinary person can't make this. Trading them for a tape recorder would be far too great a loss. These are national treasures.

Some friends of my parents came to look too. The moment the door opened my father would warn them, "don't praise him." They didn't praise me outright, but the feeling came through. Most of them were writers and artists who had been persecuted, full of bitterness, and the sight of a young person daring to do this delighted them.

My father joined the revolution early; he was a Communist literary youth. He studied English, and in 1931 was admitted to the department of foreign literature at National Qingdao University, under the Nationalist government. My father opposed the Nationalists and in two years at the university organized three big class strikes. He was secretary of the underground Party branch and founded the Seagull Drama Society, with Huang Jing as its lead. Jiang Qing worked as a librarian at the university and performed with their troupe.

Qingdao University had only just been founded. Liang Shiqiu was their department head, teaching Shakespeare, and Wen Yiduo was vice president. Shen Congwen taught in the Chinese department, and my father sat in on his classes too.

He studied Western literature, but his life's work was mostly Chinese literature — writing about the countryside, about the land, and he wrote it very well. In 1949 he published his first novel about the war against Japan, Hinterland, and in 1950 Literary Gazette singled it out for criticism — the first novel to be criticized after the founding of the People's Republic. He spent years afterward writing self-criticisms. Fortunately the earliest round of criticism wasn't as brutal as what came later. He was always telling me that among his friends, the talented and the upright all came to a bad end.

He never praised me. He criticized me for being conceited, full of myself, bound to take a hard fall sooner or later, and said that if I didn't change I'd end up in prison. Later it gradually shifted. We had three rooms; the front one was large and he sometimes wrote there, and when he saw I needed the space he'd clear out and go write in the back room. He went to the Stars Art Exhibition, saw how many people admired my carvings, and after that he was more supportive of my work — still without praising me.

The Stars exhibition was well thought of. After the first show closed, the student union invited us to the academy for a discussion. Sun Kexiang, the union chair, spoke about how much the Stars Art Exhibition had shaken them, how good it was in every way, and ended by saying that many of their students and teachers agreed Wang Keping's work was master-level. I hadn't been carving a year.

Chen Danqing wanted to paint a series as his graduation work, and he settled on Stars, starting with a set of figure drawings. He came looking for me twice. He said, I've been painting for more than ten years and I'm still doing exercises; Keping, the first time your knife goes in, you're already creating. Later he told my brother that by academy standards Wang Keping is an artistic hooligan — charging straight ahead, brazen.

Teachers and students at the art academy usually wouldn't bother going to see an ordinary exhibition, but they came to Stars again and again, and it started arguments. Almost every well-known figure in the art world went. Mr. Pan Xunqin left his telephone number and invited me to his home. Professor Qian Shaowu asked about my carving background; a student standing nearby said I still needed some grounding in carving technique, and Mr. Qian disagreed, saying it was enough that the work came from genuine feeling. Mr. Zheng Ke — a professor at the Central Academy of Arts and Design, who had studied in France and was later labeled a rightist — said, beauty and ugliness turn into each other, and you have grasped that. Ye Qianyu, a professor at CAFA, a famous painter of great standing, told Chi Xiaoning to bring several of the Stars to his house: he wanted to trade his own work for theirs. Huang Rui and Bo Yun both traded paintings for Ye Qianyu's. Bo Yun later sold his for a high price. I didn't trade with him, and I've regretted it all my life.

Later Sun Jingbo, a professor in CAFA's mural department, saw me and said, Keping, after your exhibition something strange happened — everyone at our school was pedaling tricycles out to look for wood, there were piles of it all over campus, everyone wanted to carve. I thought to myself, if everyone's carving, my own carvings may stop being fresh before long. I ran into him again later and he said those people carved for a while, then stopped, and all that wood got thrown out again.

That's because my method was completely different from the academy's. They find a model first, draw it, make a clay study, then find wood or stone and work from the study — subject and conception come first. I start with the wood and work from what's in it. My forms are simple too, not very realistic, which makes the work quick. They said I'd started running before I could walk, skipping realism altogether.

Some people in Stars still wanted to study at the academy. Even my father said, you have to go and learn properly, you can't just do as you please. My father didn't understand art education; he thought it should be like practicing Chinese calligraphy — copying models, or following a teacher. I never wanted that.

If I'd spent my life acting in bad plays, it would have been a wasted life

I liked showing off from the time I was small, so everyone said I'd grow up to be an actor. I did become one. Thank goodness for the carving — if I'd spent my life acting in bad plays, it would have been a wasted life.

During the war against Japan my mother was in the Eighth Route Army's Frontline Drama Society. There was no television and no film then, so propaganda ran on theater, and that troupe produced a lot of people. Cui Wei was its head and later became a major film director. My mother was good at the work and stayed an actress; the others went on to become officials. In 1969 I was sent down to a farm in Heilongjiang. I wanted nothing but to leave, and my mother's old comrades helped a great deal — they were heads or political commissars of army art troupes.

I ended up at the Kunming Military Region Drama Troupe. One look and it was paradise on earth: new uniforms issued, a bed each, two to a room. A soldier, and in an art troupe, with beautiful women everywhere — nothing better was on offer at the time. But men and women didn't dare have any contact, the plays we performed were rubbish, we were forever out on field marches, and there were criticism meetings almost daily. The collective life was unbearable. I told my parents I didn't want to stay in the army. They were furious. Five years later my relations with my superiors had gone bad as well, and I asked to be demobilized.

By rights I should have gone back to Heilongjiang — wherever you came from, that's where you returned. But my father was from Hebei and had more connections, so in 1975 I was demobilized to Langfang instead. We had one day off a week then; Saturday, after work, I'd cadge a ride on a train and then take a bus home. In 1976 I got into the Central Broadcasting and Television Drama Troupe. Only that troupe had a quota for Beijing residence permits.

In 1976 Mao Zedong had not yet died. The Gang of Four was still riding high. Every cultural department in Beijing was busy "criticizing Deng." Our television troupe put together a stage play criticizing Deng too, meaning to perform it first and then film it for television. One day rehearsals were suddenly stopped. None of us knew why, and everyone was quite pleased. Later we learned that Mao Zedong had died, and soon after that the Gang of Four was arrested. History changed.

With the Gang of Four brought down, the station had to "keep pace with the times" again, and the troupe badly needed a script — one criticizing the Gang of Four. The writing and directing group had more than a dozen people, and in twenty-odd years not one of them had produced a decent script. I thought I'd better write one, because then I could transfer into the writing and directing group; being an actor at the troupe was crushingly dull. I wrote a script about Zhou Rongxin, the minister of education, who was denounced by the Gang of Four's henchmen and died in a meeting room at the Ministry of Education — what a terrible ending that is. The troupe's leaders read it, were overjoyed, and wanted to stage it at once.

After the troupe sent the Zhou Rongxin script up, the Broadcasting Affairs Bureau put Mei Yi in charge of revising it. Mei Yi had been head of the Broadcasting Bureau, was criticized and pushed out during the Cultural Revolution, then came back as an adviser to the bureau with his influence intact. He was a cultured man himself — he translated How the Steel Was Tempered. But his thinking turned out to be rigid. His comments on my script were: this line has never appeared in People's Daily. That line has never appeared in People's Daily either. I said the language of theater isn't the language of a newspaper. We fell into a real standoff. Mei Yi said that if I didn't revise it, it wouldn't be staged. But when I did revise it, they didn't read it. There were no photocopiers then, so every revision meant copying the whole thing out by hand. In the end I just changed the cover page each time and called that a revision. Every time they'd say, much better, much better, keep working at it, revise it once more. I finally understood that tangling with these people was a waste of time. Theater is collective work anyway.

I watched Bai Jingzhou, the troupe's scenic artist, painting — free, working alone, starting a thing himself and finishing it himself. And I thought, whatever I do has to be individual work, not collective work.

While I was still tangled up in revisions with the troupe, I wrote a one-act play meant as a tribute to Yu Luoke, called The Judge and the Fugitive. Since I passed Xidan on my way to work every day, I submitted it to the unofficial journals on Xidan's Democracy Wall. Today was a literary journal, and I sent it there first.

I went to see Bei Dao and Mang Ke, who gave me a whole set of opinions on my script — one listen and it was clear they knew nothing about theater. I sent it to Beijing Spring next and got no reply, then submitted it to Fertile Soil, and in the end both journals published it at the same time.

We'd finally got into the art museum, finally been recognized (in fact we were nowhere near it)

That night at Huang Rui's, the first question we discussed was where to hold the exhibition. Even finding a place was hard. In the end we went to the open-air garden at the art museum.

After the exhibition in the museum's open-air garden was stopped, we held a march. I was strongly in favor of the march. I felt we had to do something out of the ordinary. Don't be ordinary. Making art is the same.

Actually I wasn't thinking about myself much then — I was thinking about the future of the whole country. And you feel brave: the things other people don't dare say, you say. Chinese people are still timid. They'll say things behind closed doors and then not dare say them in the open.

Our generation went through the Cultural Revolution. We had some experience, some strategy, we knew where to stop — being too extreme gets you nowhere. I was still a bit more extreme; the others were steadier and more strategic.

Once the exhibition moved into the museum the mood changed. At the start, outside the museum, it was rebellion, a confrontation: inside the museum was the exhibition for the 30th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic, all works singing the state's praises; outside was work completely at odds with the official line.

Inside the museum it was another matter. We were more excited in there. There were more visitors. We'd finally got into the art museum, finally been recognized (in fact we were nowhere near it). It really was a major event in Beijing. Because People's Daily ran a notice, many people came from out of town. And not only art lovers — people from every walk of life came.

Honestly, I never felt we'd been co-opted. But everyone else said so.

Later Liu Xun asked whether we wanted to join the Artists Association; Liu Xun was on good terms with us. All right, we said, we'll join. But joining came with no benefits at all, no salary. We got nothing out of it. None of us was trying to get inside the system anyway — that was never going to happen. And the state had no such intention: come in, we'll make you a teacher at the art academy, a magazine editor, something at the museum — no chance.

Later still, in 1983, Huang Rui, Ma Desheng and I put on an exhibition of our own at Zixinlu Primary School. I arranged that one: found a primary school, on their holiday, and paid the school some money. You couldn't put on another Stars. I wanted oil painting, sculpture and printmaking, and the three of us were fairly representative of those. It wasn't a formal exhibition either. But then we invited foreign journalists, and the show was ordered shut at once.

I chased after every foreign woman I saw — it was the only way out of the country then

Finding out we could sell work to foreigners was pure accident. There was no market then, no galleries in Beijing, only the Artists Association's exhibition hall — nothing like today. And when you were making the work you never thought about selling it.

After the first Stars Art Exhibition we met foreigners who wanted to buy our work. We knew more French people than others. The French were willing to socialize with artists. The first to make contact with the artists was the French ambassador, who invited them to receptions at the embassy.

I sold the least of anyone. I didn't want to sell the good work. Once I knew it could sell, I didn't want to sell it. I was thinking of taking it abroad to exhibit, of getting it into museums.

But some people started selling. Bo Yun sold a lot, and painted fast too. Every time he went to a gathering with foreigners he'd tuck a small roll of paintings under his arm and come back having sold them all, his wallet fat. Ma Desheng was riding high then, one of Beijing's first ten-thousand-yuan households.

By the time I left the country I'd taken nearly all my important work with me, several dozen pieces. My wife was moving anyway, so they went into the boxes along with the clothes and everything else. My wife is French. She taught French at Peking University first, then worked at a foreign company, and she had a car. So I was the first in Stars to get a driver's license, and I drove her car. After that Mao Lizi and Bo Yun got cars; they'd made good money selling paintings.

They say I chased after every foreign woman I saw. That's true. And not only me — every Chinese person wanted to go abroad then. Some had the chance and some didn't. Leaving was very difficult. Qu Leilei had relatives in England; I didn't. It was the only way out for me.

There was a saying then that Chinese women who "fooled around" with foreigners had "lost the nation's dignity."

Deng Xiaoping said some girls were now fooling around with foreigners, losing the nation's dignity, and should be punished severely. So the whole country started rounding these girls up. They were called "offenders against national dignity." I said afterward, well then, I'll go and earn some national dignity.

My father wasn't happy about my wanting to leave the country. He thought we worshipped foreign things and imagined the outside world as far better than it was. But I had no future at home; I had to go. Huang Rui and I applied for passports at about the same time and neither of us was approved. In the end a French parliamentary delegation got in to see Hu Yaobang, raised the matter in passing, and Hu Yaobang approved it on the spot. Otherwise there was nothing to be done. None of the officials below him would make the call.

1984, the year I left the country. The Stars Art Exhibition was already several years past, and only a few people still remembered Stars. Art has always been a small circle. In 1979 the political weather happened to suit, which is why the Stars Art Exhibition had such a large effect. Afterward things went back to normal. Circumstances of every kind had shifted: "anti-liberalization," "anti-spiritual-pollution." Ideology started to tighten again. Once it tightens, the people who read the wind follow whatever line comes from above.

When I first got to France I applied to the government for an artist's studio, in the north of Paris, a long way from the center. The studios all had large glass windows facing the street — the government wanted the public to see artists at work. But the first thing every artist did after moving in was cover the glass up. The area had a lot of immigrants and was somewhat rough; I lived there ten years and then moved.

When Bei Dao, Shao Fei, A Cheng, Gu Cheng, Xie Ye, Li Xianting and others came to Paris, they all stayed at my place. Bei Dao is a very correct person, formal and serious. When the artists sat around telling dirty jokes, Bei Dao would turn away and stay out of it.

Artists who go abroad run into one large difficulty: having seen so much work by Western masters, you can't help feeling outmatched, as if nearly everything has already been done by someone else. Two roads are left — follow the trends coming out of the West, or develop China's own tradition. When I first arrived I made the rounds of museums in one country after another, thinking about my own direction. After looking at so much work by the masters of modern art, and turning it over and over, I came out more confident instead: I'm not like them! An apple and a banana — which is better? Better to walk my own road.

Huang Rui doesn't see it that way. "Wang Keping, you have to change — how can an artist use one material and make one kind of work his whole life?" He changes with every series.

Some people also say I've changed: Wang Keping's early work was rebellious, so why does he only carve women's bodies now? In fact I was carving the human body from the very start. It's just that the media liked to report the political pieces.

A person's nature is hard to change and the impulse to rebel doesn't go away. What I set myself against now is the global fashion in art. Does that count as rebellion? It takes more confidence, and a longer, more stubborn effort.

In-text images and the cover image courtesy of Wang Keping

In the next piece we'll introduce Li Yongcun, an artist who took part in the Stars Art Exhibition. In 1979, Li Yongcun gave himself the assumed name "Bo Yun" to avoid the trouble that taking part in Stars might bring.