Dancing, motionlessly, through time
An octogenarian sculptor's childhood experiences with her archaeologist father inspired her to devote her life to creating replicas of ceramic statuettes of women dancers from various dynasties, Chen Nan reports.
Family legacy
Wang was born in Xiaoxian county, Suzhou city, East China's Anhui province. She studied at an art school in Xi'an — home to the world-renowned Terracotta Warriors, excavated from Emperor Qinshihuang's Mausoleum Site Museum. In 1979, she became one of the creators of the first life-size Terracotta Warrior replica.
She also won a number of national and international awards, such as the gold award at the 44th edition of the Brussels-Eureka innovation, research and new technologies exhibition in Brussels, Belgium, in 1995. She retired in 2000.
"Although I was retired, one thing lingered in my mind, which compelled me to work again," Wang says.
She recalls that it was her father, renowned painter, sculptor and pioneer of Chinese art archaeology, Wang Ziyun (1897-1990), who inspired her to devote herself into making replicas of dancing clay figurines.
Her father studied sculpture in France in the 1940s and later returned to China, where he and her mother advocated for the establishment of professional teams in art archaeology as part of cultural preservation efforts.
