Sculpting the imagination

Acclaimed artist created characters that pull at the heartstrings while allowing viewers to use their minds to fill in the blanks, Lin Qi reports.

For many years, Qian Shaowu (1928-2021) remembered often hearing the sounds of the erhu — a Chinese two-stringed fiddle — by A Bing, a neighbor with bad eyesight, almost every night during his childhood.

In the tumultuous 1930s, A Bing, whose birth name was Hua Yanjun, made a living as a street musician in Wuxi, Jiangsu province, where Qian was born and raised in an intellectual family.

A Bing's eye disease deteriorated over time and eventually, he lost his sight completely.