The Chinese artist who, like his inspiration Gaudí, will not live to see his masterpiece completed

Song Peilun is the archetypal Chinese artist: he is slim, has long, loose hair, always dresses in a traditional changshan tunic and scatters old proverbs throughout his sometimes-hard-to-decipher discourse. But his great masterpiece was inspired by a European.

Song’s Yelang Valley has some­thing in common with both Park Güell and the still-unfinished Sagrada Família cathedral – two of legendary Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí’s most prominent creations – in Barcelona, Spain. Like the first, Song’s surreal park, which is full of scary representations of faces, is built on the gentle slopes of a hill; in this case, a hill on the outskirts of Guiyang, capital of southern China’s Guizhou province. And, like the second, its creator will not live to see his creation completed.

Although Song started on the artworks and constructing the buildings spread around the 20-hectare lot 21 years ago, only half of his master plan has been completed.

“I will keep working until the day I die, but I’m already 78 years old and I know I won’t live much longer,” Song tells Post Magazine, while sipping from a cup of green tea. “Gaudí could not foresee his death and was killed by a tram [in 1926, at the age of 73], when the Sagrada Família was still in the early stages of construction. But his spirit carries on, almost a century after he passed away, and the world is yet to witness the opening ceremony of his masterpiece. I hope the same will happen with Yelang Valley. My wish is that someone will love it as much as I do and keep the work going once I’m gone.”

 Not far from the two-storey building in which Song talks, villagers work on a five-metre-high sculpture under the scorching sun, carefully adding layers of stones to what will soon be another gigantic head overlooking the stream that runs through the valley.