Sculpting the imagination

The work titled Standing Statue of A Bing orchestrates a sculptural symphony to visualize the sorrowful, penetrating melodies A Bing played. It is now on show at The Master's Touch on the Heartstrings, an exhibition of Qian's sculptures and drawings at the Tsinghua University Art Museum, running through May 5.

This standing A Bing is placed next to Sitting Statue of A Bing, another work of the musician that Qian created in 2004.

In the piece, Qian delineated his former neighbor in a more relaxing state: With a lowered head, A Bing is deep in his performance, and his thin stretched-out right arm pulls the erhu bow to its limit.

Yin Shuangxi, the exhibition's curator and a professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, says Qian is a representative of first-generation sculptors after the founding of the People's Republic of China who blended European and Chinese artistic traditions.

After Qian enrolled in the Central Academy of Fine Arts in the late 1940s, he was tutored by Wang Linyi, a sculptor of note who studied and lived in France for years and was trained with the academic principles of classical European art.

Qian studied another six years at the I.E. Repin St. Petersburg State Academic Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Russia from 1953 to 1959.

"Equipped with his experiences of studying sculpture, Qian ventured into the long-term research of the Chinese cultural tradition and aesthetic spirit, and presented that aspect in his work," Yin says.