Lava dog n°3 Kong Shengqi

WORK

Kong Shengqi's works, carved from soft, light-colored wood, conjure up fantastical, organic creatures with round faces and naive features, sometimes almost childlike, sometimes terrifying.

Her obvious love of wood as a material and the way she carves it particularly evoke the arts of North American natives, who can be found in Alaska or the Inuit lands of Canada.

ARTIST

A young Chinese artist born in Beijing in 1989, Kong Shengqi chose to move to France in 2015 after studying architecture in China. She initially took a second cycle "option design d'espace" at the Institut supérieur des arts de Toulouse before entering the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, where she obtained a DNSAP with congratulations from the jury in 2018 and will be part of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris admissions jury the following year. She is also the winner of the Beaux-Arts de Paris x Altarea project in 2020 and the Beaux-Arts de Paris x Moët Hennessy project and the Prix Gide - Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2021. She now lives and works in Paris.

Kong Shengqi's works, carved from soft, light-colored wood, conjure up fantastical, organic creatures with round faces and naive features, sometimes almost childlike, sometimes terrifying.

Her obvious love of wood as a material and the way she carves it particularly evoke the arts of the native North Americans, who can be found in Alaska or the Inuit lands of Canada.

In the "project" report on her latest exhibition, Margaux Brugvin explains that her sculptures "are designed to be used in invented forms of ritual. We look through the cavity of a screaming face to discover the slits of two eyes on the other side of the sculpture". Kong Shengqi's sculptures evoke sacred objects, human or animal divinities onto which visitors are free to project their own references and interpretations, exploring "his childhood fascinations and terrors, the mystery of what goes on inside bodies, inside every living being, the biological or mystical forces that govern every entity that makes up our world, and of which we understand so little".