Love for home shines through

Forty works of late sculptor Yan Dehui are on display at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, Lin Qi reports.

Wu Weishan, director of the National Art Museum of China, recollects a long car ride one winter morning in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comte region, eastern France in 2018.

Through the woods delivering "a poetic mood to remind one of the landscapes of Barbizon school", Wu and his colleagues arrived at the end of a country road where stood the former studio of Yan Dehui (1908-87), the Chinese sculptor who lived and worked in France since the 1930s till death.

They were greeted by Yan's daughter, Marianne Yen, who ushered the visiting group into the house, in which "sculptures filled almost every corner of the room, the desks and the top of packed book cabinets," Wu recalls, "and there were unfinished works and chunks of huangyangmu (boxwood) left for carving".

Wu says he had never met Yan, but "seeing his works, as if I had seen the man". He adds: "The works, carrying the marks of his hands and fingers, whether been done or not, touched us deeply, all the while conveying his homesickness."