Maryn Varbanov (born 1932, Bulgaria – died 1989, Beijing) was a prestigious artist whose influence stretched from his native Sofia, to his adopted home of Paris, and more notably to China, where he was a powerful influence on the formation of the country’s avante-garde in its crucial, early years. The transformative impact of the industrial revolution on art drives the advent of the Total Art Movement that swept across Europe and America in 1960s, fibre art began to reflect more subtle shifts and took on strong spatial and sculpture tendencies. It was exactly at this juncture that Varbanov tried to foster China’s own contemporary fibre art, and the ‘soft sculpture’ was born out of breakthroughs in terms of materials and spatial dimension of Varbanov’s art.
With his wife Song Huai-Kuei (1937–2006), a legend in the spheres of Chinese art, film, music, and fashion, they together foster a forward-looking creative scene and cultivated a modern, international lifestyle in China during the 1980s and 1990s.