Kong Shengqi

Young Chinese artist born in Beijing in 1989, Kong Shengqi chose to settle in France from 2015 after studying architecture in China. She initially followed a second cycle “space design option" at the Institute of Arts in Toulouse before entering École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris where she obtained a DNSAP with the congratulations of the jury in 2018 and will be part of the admissions jury for the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris the following year. She is also the laureate of Beaux-Arts de Paris x Altarea project in 2020 and Beaux-Arts de Paris x Moët Hennessy project and Prix Gide – Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2021. She currently lives and works in Paris.

Kong Shengqi's works, carved in wood, soft and clear, bring out of the material fantastic and organic creatures, with round faces and naive features, sometimes almost childish and sometimes terrifying.

Her obvious love for the material that is wood and her way of sculpting particularly evokes the arts of the natives of North America, which can be found in Alaska or on the Inuit lands of Canada.

In the “project" report dedicated to her last exhibition, Margaux Brugvin specifies that her sculptures “are thought to be used in forms of invented rituals. One looks through the cavity of a screaming face to discover the slits of two eyes on the other side of the sculpture. For the latter, Kong Shengqi's sculptures evoke sacred objects, human or animal deities on which the visitor is free to project their own references and interpretations and come to explore “their childhood fascinations and terrors, the mystery of what happens inside bodies, inside every living being, the biological or mystical forces that govern every entity and make up our world of which we do not understand that so few things. »