Huang Rui and Wang Keping are two of the founders of the first non-conformist artist’s group “THE STARS” (XING XING) which was formed in 1979 during the post-cultural revolution “Beijing Spring.” The Chinese avant - garde art group the “Stars,” which included artists Wang Keping, Ai Weiwei, Ma Desheng and Li Shuang was active in from 1979 to 1983. This ground-breaking group of amateur artists was the first publicly active art collective to protest government censorship after the Cultural Revolution.

Huang Rui will be presenting works from the early 80s and also recent works mixing color, structure and language. Wang Keping will be showing wood sculptures.

About the artists: 

Huang Rui is a Chinese artist known for his social and cultural criticism. He is widely considered one of the founding members of the Chinese Contemporary art movement, and continues to produce work that reflects the concerns of a highly socially engaged artist through historical references and satire of reality. Huang Rui’s work is characterized by symmetry and simplicity of form, as well as by the use of primary colors. His work stands alone as aesthetically pleasing; however, he is recognized as a socially minded, and thus often controversial, artist. Throughout his career, he has continued to be vocal about his belief in the importance of free expression - and as a result, he has faced a large amount of censorship from the government.

Huang Rui is an artist that has at once the ability to combine extreme intellect with highly sensitive and personal
approach. His works are finely crafted and meticulously finished. Within a minimalist exterior there hides mountains of meanings and connotations stemming from ancient Chinese philosophy, modern - day communist hypocrisy or current society’s middling obsessions. There is never just one thing hidden in Huang Rui’s works but several for his mind turns the pieces around and around as his ideas grow like shoots of complexity.

Wang Keping is one of China's foremost sculptors. His work defies definition. Inspired in his early years by masters of European Modernist sculptors and even African sculpture, he has found his unique voice in sculpture deriving from simplicity and nature, material and the non-material, physical and spiritual. Through his bestial erotic forms and swirling lines he works in a language of natural intuition of space and object, collaborating with his material and the secrets it has to reveal. His works are a collaboration between material and artist and his genius is to incorporate knots or twists into the the final work.

Wang Keping is one of China’s most acclaimed and recognized artists in contemporary Chinese art history. He was a founding member of the important Beijing 1979 movement called “The Stars” (Xing Xing). Wang Keping was the most outspoken and recognized non-conformist artist of the group who emerged from Communist China’s highly controlled and almost non-existent art environment in 1979 with ground-breaking sculptures Silence (1978), Idol (1979) and Chain (1979), now part of the M+ Sigg collection, representing a radical departure from over 30 years of Socialist Realism promoted by Maoist government officials. Keping’s early works, were noted to be the most provocative of the group, depicting shocking portraits of faces with their mouths plugged into silence, eyes blinded from seeing, chains around the neck, bodies being squeezed by enormous hands, and grotesque tumors, which Keping described as ‘cancers’. Keping explained at the time, “It is about people who can see but are forbidden to look. They have mouths but are forbidden to speak. This is what happened to the grassroots movement in China.” The legendary portrait of Chairman Mao, Idol, portrayed Chairman Mao as a Buddha-like figure not to be questioned showing a shocking rebellion unseen in China at that time.

His works have been exhibited in the National Art Museum of China, the Fukuoka Museum in Japan, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Musée Maillol in Paris, the Groningen Museum in the Netherlands, the He Xiangning Art Museum in China and on the Avenue des Champs-Elysées in Paris at Les Champs de la Sculpture. In 2013 the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Arts (UCCA) in Beijing presented a major exhibition of Wang Keping’s work, celebrating his first solo in China since he left China in 1984.

-10 Chancery Lane Gallery

Photo by: Li Xiaobin