A list of the most important Chinese sculptors
Sculpting and sculptures are for sure a long tradition in China, from the early days of the “middle kingdom” but as well as propaganda in the time of Mao and the cultural revolution. There has been a tremendous creative phase after China’s slow opening to the world. Nowadays there are many famous and important Chinese sculptors which have developed a different language from scary to humorous.
In the following list I give you a quick overview of the most important Chinese sculptors today and if applicable I added their website or Wikipedia link so you can dig into their works on your own.
1. Chen Wenling 陈文令
Chen Wenling born 1969 is a contemporary Chinese Neo-Realist artist. Through a variety of surreal, often grotesque sculptures—most often executed in a bright monochrome red—he examines the rapid rise of consumerism in modern-day China and the fraught relationship with its more austere Communist past.
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2. Zhan Wang
Zhang Wang born 1962 in Beijing, is known for being a contemporary Chinese sculptor but he is also known in other art forms such as installations, photography and video. Most of his artworks consist of conceptual ideas where he “embraces and subverts several other major traditions in modern art, both Chinese and Euro-American”. Many of his works include the use of simplistic objects that serve the purpose of telling a complex idea.
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Yue Min-Jun (born 1962, Daqing, China) initially started painting as a hobby. The paintings, sculptures and installations of Yue Minjun feature uniform laughing pink faces, which appear to be self-portraits. Through various symbols, metaphors, signs, or through depictions of daily life the artist constructs various realities against which the laughing figures are rendered.
3. Yue Minjun
4. Liu Bolin
He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Shandong College of Arts in 1995 and his Master of Fine Arts from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 2001. His work has been exhibited in museums around the world. He is famous as “the invisible man” for his photograph & performance art of blending in the pictures.
5. Ah Xian
Ah Xian was born 1960 in Bejing and is now based in Sydney, Australia. He was a practicing artist in China throughout the 1980s and sought political asylum in Australia following the events of Tiananmen Square in 1989. In the 1990s he started to work on porcelain casting, and produced the China China and Human Human series of busts and figures.
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6. Guan Wei
Guan Wei is born in 1957 in Beijing, China. 1989, three years after graduating from the Department of Fine Arts at Beijing Capital University, Guan Wei came to Australia to take up an artist-in-residence at the Tasmanian School of Art. Across painting, sculpture, and installation, his work conveys profound stories of loss, migration, identity, and notions of boundaries and place, interweaving an understanding of tradition and the past in the face of overwhelming global change today. Now he lives and works in both Beijing and Sydney.
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7. Wang Shugang
Famous sculptor Wang Shugang was born 1960 in Beijing, he studied sculpting at Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA). 1989 he moved to Germany where he lived 10 years. 2000 he moved back to Beijing where he lives now with his family.
8. Chen QingQing
Chen Qing Qing was born in Beijing in 1953 and studied Medicine, finishing her English/German Literature Studies in Beijing and Vienna. She started installation creations and now works as a professional artist in Beijing since 1994. Chen Qing Qing’s detailed fabric art installation and sculpture works are made by natural materials; silk, hemp, dry flowers, paper or pearls.
9. Yin Xiuzhen
Yin Xiuzhen is a Chinese sculptor and installation artist born in 1963 in Beijing. She incorporates used textiles and keepsakes from her childhood in Beijing to show the connection between memory and cultural identity. She studied oil painting in the Fine Arts Department of Capital Normal University, in Beijing from 1985 to 1989. After graduation, Yin taught at the high school attached to the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Her work has been described as “possessing human warmth, intimacy, and a sense of nostalgia which propels introspection of one’s self—traditions, emotions, and beliefs.
10. Zhu Wei
He is one of China’s most visible contemporary practitioners of the post-Tiananmen period. Zhu is known for his subtly quizzical critique of politics and society in a rapidly evolving China. Faithful to the classical artistic medium, Chinese painting, the Beijing-born-and-based Zhu is principally a painter but his China China series of monumental Mao-jacket-clad Chinese cadres, begun in 2000, has achieved iconic status.
11. Ren Zhe
Ren Zhe was born in 1983. He got his Bachelor’s degree as a sculptor from the Academy of Fine Arts Sculpture Department, Tsinghua University 2005. The sculptures of Ren Zhe exhibit his personal firm faith in art by showing great respect for the classical spirit in sculpture.
12. Xu Zhen
Xu Zhen is a leading figure among the young generation of Chinese artists. His extensive body of work, which includes photography, installation art and video, entails theatrical humor and social critique. Most of the projects are informed by performance and conceptual art. Xu’s work focuses on human sensitivity and dramatizes the humdrum of urban living.
2009, Xu Zhen founded ‘MadeIn Company,’ a contemporary art creation corporate that plays off of the phrase “Made in China”. 2013, MadeIn Company launched the brand “Xu Zhen” and led MadeIn to expand into curatorial production, research and publications.
13. Luo Brothers
The Luo Brothers are a Chinese artist trio. They live and work in Beijing and are known for their Pop Art take on propaganda and kitsch items produced during the Cultural Revolution in China. They create painted fiberglass sculptures of children which are figures from Chinese advertisements. Consisting of three brothers, Luo Wei Dong (b. 1963), Luo Wei Bing (b. 1964), and Luo Wei Guo (b. 1972) from Nanning, China, they went on to attend the Guangxi Academy of Art, the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art, and the Central Academy of Applied Arts.
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14. Li Lihong
Contemporary Chinese sculptor Li Lihong was born in Jingdezhen. Once a leading producer of Chinese porcelain that was the center for royally commissioned ceramics. Li graduated from the China Central Academy of Art and Design in Beijing and trained with master of ceramics Qin Xiling.
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15. Siu Jianguo
Sui Jianguo (b. 1956 in Qingdao, Shandong province) received a BA in the Fine Arts Department from the Shandong University of Arts in 1984 and an MA in the Sculpture Department from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1989, where he currently presides as the head of the Sculpture Department. He has been praised by art critics for being a “pioneer venturing to the farthest reaches of Chinese sculpture.”
16. Zheng Lu
Zheng Lu (郑路), born 1978 in Inner Mongolia is a chinese sculptor based in Beijing. Before continuing to Beijing’s prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts from 2004 until 2007, he studied at Lu Xun Fine art Academy from 1998-2003. Zheng has mainly produced sculpture and installation work with steel structure, and also two-dimensional, multimedia, stage and public art.
17. Huang Yong Ping
Huang Yong Ping is one of the most famous Chinese Avantgarde artists. Born in Xiamen1954, he was recognized as the most controversial and provocative artist of the Chinese art scene in the 1980s. Huang was one of the first artists to consider that art was a strategy. He was a self-taught student educating himself under three well-known men. Joseph Beuys German artist and art theorist, John Cage an American music theorist and philosopher, and Marcel Duchamp a French artist that’s associated with Dadaist and Surrealist.
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18. Shi Jianmin
Shi Jianmin is one of the most respected artists in China whose work encompasses fine art, design, architecture and landscape design. Born in Xi’an in 1962, he graduated from the Xi’an Art School in 1982 and completed his studies at the Central Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University in 1986.
19. Shi Jinsong
Shi Jinsong (born 1969, Dangyang County Hubei Province, China) is a Chinese sculptor based in Wuhan and Beijing. He studied at Hubei Academy of Fine Arts in China where he majored in sculpture and mastered an array of traditional styles and techniques. He graduated in 1994.
20. Li Hongbo
Li Hongbo was born in China’s Jilin province in 1974. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Jilin Normal University in 1996, Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in Folk Art in 2001, MFA degree in Experimental Art in 2010, both from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Li Hongbo is best known for his lifelike paper sculptures, made entirely out of paper and glue.
21. Xie Aige
The Chinese sculptor Xie Aige (born in Hunan, China) is able to move young and old, art experts and art lovers with her minimalist style of sculpture. In her work Xie Aige shows that “even the stillest pose can touch us deeply.”
22. Li Chen
Li Chen or Li Zhen was born in 1963 in Yunlin, Taiwan. He started his career accepting projects from Buddhist shrines to produce traditional Buddha statues. He studied the Buddhist and Taoist classics. In the 1990s he began to focus on a career in art. Li’s works are infused with personal sentiment
23. Hu Ke
Hu Ke was born in Hunan Province in 1978; Graduated from the Sculpture Department of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute and now works and lives in Beijing; Hu Ke was Inducted into the “Youth plus” talent plan, a program supported by China National Arts Fund, in 2014.
24. Ai Weiwei
Ai Weiwei was born on 28 August 1957 in Beijing and collaborated with Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron as the artistic consultant on the Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Summer Olympics. As a political activist, he has been highly and openly critical of the Chinese Government‘s stance on democracy and human rights.
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25. Liu Wei
Liu Wei graduated from the China Academy of Art in 1996 and works in varied media – video, installation, drawing, sculpture, and painting – with no uniting stylistic tendency.
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26. Xiang Jing
Xiang Jing born 1968 is an artist based in Beijing mostly working in sculpture. He graduated from the Department of Sculpture of China Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA,中央美术学院) in Beijing. She was instantly successful in her field. Her graduating works won first prize in the “Graduation Show of Central Academy of Fine Arts 1995” and she also won the Okamatsu Family Fund. Xiang Jing’s work practice is problem-oriented. Within the gradually marginalized realist sculpting language framework, Xiang Jing has made idiosyncratic and influential contemporary experiments. She shapes each of her sculptures into individual appearance and characters, hand-paints her sculptures in many layers, and chooses fiberglass as her principle material.
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28. Li Wei
Li Wei (born in 1970, Hubei, China) is a contemporary artist from Beijing. His work often depicts him in apparently gravity-defying situations. Wei started off his performance series, Mirroring, and later on took off attention with his Falls series which shows the artist with his head and chest embedded into the ground. His work is a mixture of performance art, photography, and installation that creates illusions of a sometimes dangerous reality. These images are not computer montages but use mirrors, metal wires, scaffolding, and acrobatics.
29. Diao Wei
Diao Wei is a chinese sculptor born 1979 in Shandong, China. Graduated from Sculpture Department of Central Academy of Fine Arts with MA in 2010.
30. Wei-Cheng Tsai
Born in Taichung, Taiwan, Tsai Wei-Cheng graduated from Taichung Dajia Engineering Secondary School. As a sculptor he finds inspiration from the famous Chinese mythology “Journey to the West.” His creations are presented with restraint and light humor, conveying subtle oriental spirit. The harmonious warm copper and stainless steel comes together in a balance union.
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31. Wang Keping
Wang Keping is a Chinese sculptor born in 1949 in Beijing, who currently lives and works in Paris and one of the founders of the non-conformist artist group “The Stars” (Xing Xing).
The group of young avantgarde artists challenged the status quo and were pivotal in initiating some of the first free art expressions in the Post-Mao era. As one of France and China’s foremost sculptors, Wang Keping’s sculptures are an exploration of the human form.
32. Yang Maoyuan
Yang Maoyuan was born 1966, in Dalian. He is a highly regarded chinese sculptor well known for his large and diverse body of work encompassing painting, sculpture, photography and installation. Yang’s works often express his understanding on the sources of culture and the core of life, the theme he most interested in is how Art generated the inner power that could adapt with its Time, and how an individual artist express this inner power by his/her own way. In 2002, he won the CCAA modern art of China prize in 2002.
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33. Shen Jingdong
Shen Jingdong was born in 1965 in the town of Nanjing (province of Jiangsu), China. He graduated from the Nanjing Xiaozhuang Normal School in 1984 and from the Nanjing Arts Institute in 1991.
In 2008, his Chinese and international artistic career evolved quickly; Shen becomes an important contemporary artist of the new wave, with his Hero series. He created into different kinds of people the image of the soldier and of the icons of Chinese life as represented in new forms, sometimes diverted in expressive colors (Blue, Green, Red or Yellow).
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34. Li Xiaofeng
The artist Li Xiaofeng began his artistic career as a muralist then turned his attention to sculpture. Li makes wearable porcelain costume and installation from ceramic shards coming from the Song, Ming, Yuan and Qing dynasties, which are sewn together on a leather undergarment.
35. Ye Sen
Ye Sen is an inveterate experimentalist. He sees art as an opportunity to “take reason and logic to the limit.” With the series that includes Analysis 4 (2009), he took wood and the tradition of wood-carving to their limits as well. Without adding anything, only subtracting, he set out to make wood look as if it wasn’t wood at all. To carve a single log in such a way that its center became (apparently) something else. Viewers’ astonishment suggests he succeeded.