Wei Libo was born in China in the 1990s. He began his artistic studies in France in 2017 at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, Saint-Nazaire. He continued his studies in 2020 at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, graduating in 2024. He is currently resident at Villa Belleville.
After the massive urbanisation that followed China’s opening-up, Wei Libo underwent fundamental changes in his personal life with the loss of the house built by his grandfather, a self-taught architect and carpenter. The move that followed forced his family to part with a large number of pieces of furniture designed by his grandfather. Wei Libo then embarked on a series of sculptures celebrating the memory of his origins. He first drew inspiration from the furniture of his childhood, making replicas using traditional skills.
He then moved on to combine recycled furniture with copies of traditional Chinese ceramics and hyper-realistic wooden fruit sculptures. Frozen pears, mandarins, watermelons and melons evoke Flemish still lifes. By bringing together different techniques such as inlaid wood and ceramics with references as distant as cartoons and Chinese culture, he plays on the contradictions between modernity and tradition that contemporary Chinese society has taught him.
Curator: Maëlle Dault
Rendez-vous
Opening
Wednesday 08.01.25, 6-9pm
Artist-curator tour
Wednesday 05.02.24, 7pm
with Wei Libo and Maëlle Dault