Wang Keping (王克平) is worldwide renowned sculptor. For his first solo show ever in Shanghai the artist is presenting an unprecedented project mixing conceptual art, installation and sculpture. “All in smile” (笑口歌 in chinese) is a site specific project for which Wang Keping has made 1000 sculptures that at first can be seen as bricks. Starting from an easy shape the artist becomes an architect and renews exhibition space, building with those bricks walls and new spaces within the space. “The bricks can be piled up and form a wall, a stacked tower, lay them out and you can fill the ground, you can also use them as a chair or table, piggy bank, flowerpots on the balcony, etc.” As art is a playful thing to Wang Keping the usage can be varied. Put the piece either indoor or outdoor, they can be installed in parks like pieces of bricks or stones...there are infinite possibilities of architectural development. “It can be piled up into a small castle, a small Great Wall, a bastion of iron” shares the artist. As Wang Keping puts it himself: "When the brick is put sideways it's a mouth, put it upright and it becomes a heavenly cave.” Apart from the installation side of the project Wang Keping also plays with shapes and their meaning, going from the plain interpretations to naughty meanings.

The project is a complete cultural statement as it is also a visual poetry statement. Based on the classical poem “笑口歌”, Wang Keping shows how art should be complete, words, images and space mix in a creative outburst.

Wang Keping is born in 1949 in Beijing, Wang Keping currently lives and works in Paris. In 1979, Wang became a founding member of the first non-conformist artist’s group in China, The Stars, together with Huang Rui, Ma Desheng, Li Shuang, Ai Weiwei. In 1984, he moved to Paris, where he lives today. His works were featured in all the Stars group shows from Hong-Hong and Taipei to Tokyo as well as Beijing with the retrospective exhibition in 2007, “Origin Point”, at the Today Art Museum. He has also been exhibited in numerous solo shows in museums around the world.

Wang Keping's unique wooden sculptures, including one that featured a Buddha-like Mao figure, shocked the art world in Beijing in the late 70s and early 80s. Now living in Paris, Wang Keping continues to create these signature sculptures that juxtapose vivid emotion with a marked sense of introversion. Many of his bodies reveal torn, twisted and distorted shapes; some have lost limbs, lack eyes or mouths, or display swollen genitals. Wang Keping is particularly interested in exploring and negotiating the possibilities of rendering the female body. Visually informed by an amalgam of prehistoric ice-age statuettes and 20th century artists like Constantin Brancusi he carves heavy thighs, enormous breasts and bulbous buttocks.