For  a  man  who  works long hours with a chainsaw, Wang Keping is remarkably beatific. He smiles almost constantly, but he pairs his grin with a politely mischievous gaze. On an early summer day, he drives me past unremarkable gates on the outskirts of Paris in his beat-up white delivery van. His rustic studio and home come into view, flanked by an overgrown garden that delivers bird-song to drown out a radio advertisement promising a good price for gold.

Inside, Wang sets about fixing two cups of green tea in the studio’s kitchenette. Lucre is not among the priorities for the Chinese artist, whose artistic credentials were fired alongside his political ones. One of his early sculptures landed him at the center of the artists’ group Xing Xing, or Stars, which spearheaded a series of historic pro-democracy protests in 1970s Beijing. Wang’s Silence, 1978 — a bombastic wooden head with what appears to be a black eye and a plugged mouth — became an icon of the group’s unauthorized 1979 exhibition outside the fences of the National Art Museum.

True to this background, Wang, now 63, has staked out an uncompromising career on the fringe of the art market. “To me, making a lot of money is not important,” he says. “I want to create new things, good things. I may not have long left to live, so it’s important that I work well. It’s nice that my sculptures sell, but I don’t need a Porsche. I have the sun, the calm. I don’t go hungry. My life is good.”

It was not always thus. Conscripted into the Red Guards at age 17 and later sent to northeastern China for “re-education,” there was a period when little more than a laborer’s life seemed open to him. “It was the cultural revolution,” he recalls. “All the universities were closing, all the intellectuals worked in the fields and so did I. When we returned to the cities, all of us young artists were searching for something. I wrote plays and novels, but the censorship was very severe. I wasn’t able to stage my plays, so I stopped. Sculpture gave me independence.” The artist’s first-ever piece, Long Live Chairman Mao, 1978, was cut from the rung of a chair and shows a face stretched into a desperate scream. An arm and hand rise from the top of the head, clutching Mao’s Little Red Book.

It was not entirely fortuitous that Wang started out with a simple scrap of wood he had on hand. During the Mao years, China underwent an extensive deforestation, and wood was rationed in Beijing. As he delved deeper into his craft, procurement became an issue. To obtain his supplies, Wang plied the workers of a small kindling factory with liquor, cigarettes, and movie tickets, and they slipped him pieces of wood on the side. To this day he has no preference for the type of wood, appreciating each piece’s individual properties.

Like most Chinese artists of his generation, Wang is self-taught. He had only dabbled in painting before finding his métier in sculpture. His parents — an actress mother and writer father — were only tangential inspiration. It was his association with the Stars, Ai Weiwei among them, that emboldened him to break ground for artistic freedom in China. The government, hoping that the artists would fail publicly, allowed them to stage a full exhibition at the National Art Museum in August 1980. As many as 100,000 people came and saw Wang’s Idol, 1978, a sculptural riff on Mao, which again raised the authorities’ hackles.

Despite Ai Weiwei’s continued prominence as a dissident, China’s memory of the Stars, which also counted the painters Mao Lizi, Ma Desheng, and Li Shuang, has faded, Wang laments. “It’s already almost forgotten. The government won’t talk about it. The art teachers don’t want the younger generation to know about it. There are many Chinese artists now who sell a lot, and expensively. They say, ‘We are the first avant-garde.’ They too, don’t want to talk about the Stars. From all sides, there is no desire to talk about the Stars.”

Wang nonetheless remains well known there and internationally, perhaps most notably in France. The Stars’ activism made headlines in the West, too, and Wang was pictured with Silence on the front page of the New York Times. His arrival in Paris in 1984, with his French wife, Catherine Dezaly (whom he met while she was teaching in Beijing), marked a liberating turn in his work, which became less explicitly political but freer in figuration. He was picked up by Galerie Zürcher in 1986 and has since embraced his passion for nature and the body. Among the most characteristic works of his mature oeuvre are sculptures of voluptuous women, their bosoms bursting forth, equally grotesque and erotic, balanced between female grace and the symbolic strength of a pugilist’s gloves. Several of these were shown in his 2010 exhibition “La chair des forêts” at the Musée Zadkine, in Paris. “People see it and say, ‘Oh, so you like big-breasted women,’” Wang says. “But in life, it’s the opposite. In a sculpture, you need volume, you need to exaggerate.”

A strong sexual element also defines his male figures, and occasionally hybrids like Adam et Eve, 2006, in which an erection complements protruding labia. Scattered around Wang’s studio are more appendages standing at attention. Even the beaks of his animal creations — mainly platypus-like birds — suggest virility. “Women are easy, but making a man interesting is difficult,” explains the artist. “You need to add a lot of humor, and that’s mainly in the genitals.”