Gifts of a lifetime

Xiong Bingming's sculptures which have been donated to the National Art Museum of China. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Xiong entered the prestigious National School of Fine Arts in Paris in 1950. He taught at the University of Paris beginning in the mid-1960s until he retired in 1989. During the time he also drew, painted, sculpted and practiced calligraphy. He published several books, introducing Chinese art from a Western perspective.

He visited the Chinese mainland many times from the late 1970s, giving lectures and exhibiting. He also left some creations here, including Ru Zi Niu, a cow sculpture that kneels on its forelegs and raises its head high. Xiong crafted it in the 1980s with the assistance of Wu Weishan, now the director of NAMOC and then a young sculptor.

In Chinese, "ruziniu" means a person serving the people wholeheartedly and unselfishly. Yang once said the sculpture summarizes "a whole generation of China's intellectuals of the 20th century". It is installed in the campus of Nanjing University, in East China's Jiangsu province.

In 1998, Xiong was commissioned to sculpt a head of Lu Xun (1881-1936), the famed author and translator, by the Beijing-based National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature. Yang says that in the work, Xiong gave a full expression of the literary figure's honesty and uprightness.