“I don’t like hard, heavy materials like bronze, stone and clay. I have a fondness for fine and delicate things.”

Born: Yuxi City, Yunan province, 1953

Say sculpture and most people think of something solid and opaque. Shi Jindian’s sculptures are made of steel, yet they are light, transparent, almost ethereal. After searching for years for “a material that was brand new, completely untraditional”, he settled on steel wires. By trial and error, he learned how to crochet the two-dimensional strands into three-dimensional forms, using tools of his own devising. His wire meshes start out as wrappings around some common object. When the mesh is complete, Shi Jindian destroys or extracts the object, leaving only its steel exoskeleton. The result, he says, is a kind of fiction, a virtual reality that can be walked around and touched. Surrealist René Magritte painted a pipe along with the words: “This is not a pipe.” Shi Jindian does something similar in sculpture, making not-quite-replicas of items from musical instruments to machines. His Blue CJ750 (2008) is a replica of the Chiangjiang [Yangtze] 750, a military bike based on a pre-World War II BMW. It took him three years to make, but he found deep serenity in the toil. When people touch his sculptures, he says, they also touch “the state of mind that emerges from the labour of my hands: tranquillity and calm”.