Interview with Katie de Tilly

I met Katie some 20 years ago in Hong Kong, a Polish American girl who was working for Médecins Sans Frontières. Katie had always been passionate about Art, opened an Art gallery in 2001 and her very first artist was the sculptor Wang Keping.

Almost 20 years since Wang Keping and your art gallery, 10 Chancery Lane started to collaborate. Tell us about the man who loves women breasts !

It was so lucky that I opened my gallery almost 20 years ago with Wang Keping. An artist I truly admire and love. Wang Keping loves women and finds them to be a universal subject of beauty in his works. Perhaps they are the forbidden fruit from China’s sexual repression of his youth during the cultural revolution. There is a tenderness in his voluptuous female figures or an energetic sexual attraction in his couples. He speaks of balancing of forms, as well as using the natural elements of the wood pieces that he incorporates deftly into each work. Each wood will have a different character, some works are based on the grain’s flowing curves, others on the burly knots and protrusions. The wood truly speaks to him.

I have a wooden piece at home, a bronze sculpture on my terrace, my husband was spoiled for his birthday, you gave him a marble sculpture "trois lignes" a woman made with just three lines it is so simple and beautiful - Tell us more about this work?

The woman in 3 lines, Trois Lignes, is a break-through for Wang Keping who is in constant search of how sculptural form can indicate figuration in the least amount of intervention. This is really an intuitive talent that he bears. I feel Taoist ideas such as natural equilibrium, transformation, harmony with nature speak to us through his search of form in each sculpture.

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