Among the misconceptions the West stubbornly clings to about China is this one: there is little or no erotic art—nothing that could compare with Japanese shunga woodblock prints or with ancient Indian statues, for example. The evidence, we are often told, is that contemporary Chinese artists only very rarely dare to portray sex or nudity, and even the artists most adept at provocation hesitate to venture into such territory. [...] Does eroticism only apply to one part of Wang’s work, or would it be more necessary to ask whether this describes, obviously not the totality, but a large part of his work?
Wang was born in 1949. The Cultural Revolution, launched by Mao Zedong, lasted from 1966 until 1976, the year of the chairman’s death. Wang lived through it and suffered under it. During that decade—a decade of millions of victims, millions of detentions and persecutions—all private life was forbidden, and most often impossible, and all manifestations of sexuality were even more strictly prohibited. [...] Applied to the arts, this fanatical sexual prohibition strictly banned any representation of the nude, regarded by the authorities as an intolerable sign of moral depravity and indifference to the revolutionary project. Even daring to make a work that would have had an erotic connotation, however obliquely, was unthinkable. But, as Wang observes, and as history incessantly confirms, repression gives rise to revolt.
The nude was an ideological issue and a symbol of freedom—the freedom of bodies and the freedom of artists—something later commentary has often overlooked by failing to return to the history of the Cultural Revolution. [...] Half a century later, in Wang Keping’s works, that insurrection comes back to life, with the complicity of a piece of wood that happens to stand upright or split open.
