A Woodcarver Who Refuses to Polish: Sculpting the Villagers Around Him
Deng Kun carves villagers. Not idealized peasants, not allegorical figures, but the specific people around him — the ones who, at first, complained that his work looked crude. His answer, as he tells it, was simple: he does not want polish. He wants to catch the truth of a moment, and a polished surface would sand that away.
Deng is a professional woodcarver who studied sculpture at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, completing both his undergraduate and master’s degrees there. After graduating, he moved about ten kilometers from campus to Hufeng Mountain, a hill village in the city’s orbit. He has stayed, working among the people he carves.
People keep asking him why he carves villagers and what he is trying to say. His reply is that he is trying to say nothing. He carves what is near him — what he can see, what he feels, what he has an emotional connection with. The logic, as he puts it, is: why would I not carve them?
The question of subject matter clearly follows him. He says that if conditions allowed — if he were working in the center of Shanghai, surrounded by fashionable urban people — he would carve them too. They would be just as vivid and alive. Villagers and city dwellers, in his view, are the same kind of people, with no difference between them.
That position is quietly pointed in a Chinese art world that often treats rural subjects as nostalgia or as a marker of authenticity, and urban subjects as the default modern. Deng resists both framings. For him, the village is not a theme and the city is not a subject either; both are simply where a carver happens to stand.
The comment about roughness is the most revealing part. Villagers told him his work looked coarse, and he treated the complaint not as a verdict but as a misunderstanding of what the work is for. Wood, unlike bronze or marble, carries grain, knots and the memory of the tree. Leaving tool marks visible keeps the process present in the finished object. Polishing would make the piece smoother and more salable, and would also make it less like the person it depicts.
His account also sketches a small geography of Chinese art training. Sichuan Fine Arts Institute is one of the country’s established art schools, and its sculpture department has long pushed students toward hands-on material work. Hufeng Mountain, close enough to campus for a short commute but far enough to have its own social world, has drawn artists and studios over the years. Deng’s move there fits a familiar pattern: graduates who cannot afford city studios settle nearby and end up embedded in a place they did not plan to stay.
What comes through most clearly is a working method rather than a manifesto. He carves the people he talks to, and he lets the wood stay rough because the roughness is where the moment lives. Whether that approach travels, to a Shanghai street or anywhere else, is the question he has left open.