Choose Best Olympic Sculptures for World

Yuan Xikun is the curator of Jintai Art Gallery in Beijing. A famous painter and sculptor, he initiated a road show of the 2008 Olympic Landscape Sculptures exhibition in various cities across China as well as in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao. The show is planned to be staged in over 40 cities across the world such as Roma, London, Washington, Chicago, Sacramento, Wellington, Auckland, Lausanne and Barcelona.

The road show of Olympic sculptures is an important part of the Olympic Culture events sponsored by the Organizing Committee of the 29th Olympic Games. The selection started on August 8, 2005 and sculptors from more than 90 countries and regions sent in 2,433 sculptures. A jury of 17 international experts selected 290 pieces (sets), which were first exhibited in 14 cities across China. In 2007, 110 pieces (sets) were chosen from the preliminary 290 for shows across the world.

As president of the organizing committee for the Olympic sculptures show, Yuan Xikun explains why he started this cultural event. He says, the Olympic spirit reflects a universal desire for peaceful coexistence. The universal spirit embodies such concepts as peace, progress, harmony, development, friendship, win-win cooperation for shared human life. Compared with all other Olympic cultural activities such as variety shows and art exhibitions, sculptures come to forefront in terms of professionalism, order and continuation. The chosen sculptures for the road show will become the cultural heritage of Olympics. Sculptors across the world work together to visually display and promote the Olympic spirit.

Yuan’s sculptures are not in the show. Nor are his son’s sculptures. He says that he as the chief juror cannot include his own works and he persuaded his son to withdraw sculptures even though they passed the preliminary selection.

Yuan started his carving career in 1974. He was the first Chinese sculptor who went abroad after the third plenary session of the 11th Communist Party Congress in 1978, which ushered in the modernization drive. His father was one of the first-generation modern sculptors of China. The works by these sculptors embody a style that combines realism, classicism and romanticism. Yuan Xikun regards himself different from some artists of today who impatiently seek fame and fortune and disregard the necessity of fully arming themselves with solid knowledge and training in painting and sculpture. In his early days, he studied the body features and structures of Asians and Europeans. More than 100 world celebrities have served his models. Yuan is noted for his quick drawings within half an hour and the portraits he paints are highly acclaimed.

Yuan Xikun says that his art draws on the Three-Character Primer (a Chinese classic textbook for first-year pupils), the novels and poetry of Victor Hugo and Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, the philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau and the music of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky. It is a mixture of the West and East.

While tracing the Chinese sculpture heritage, he says that stone Buddhist statues in grottos of Dunhuang, Datong and Dazu of China reflect a profound cultural tradition. However, the art in China has suffered from disruptions and faults for historical reasons. Since the reform in late 1970s, the government has stepped up efforts to better protect art and strengthen international exchanges in cultural fields, which contribute to the development of sculpture in China today.