Works Exhibited
About
Zeng Fanzhi’s visually and historically complex paintings reflect his bold experimentation with, and fusion of, Eastern and Western artistic traditions.
Born and raised in Wuhan, China, Zeng graduated from the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts, Wuhan, in From the nineteenth century until the s, Wuhan was one of China’s most prosperous cities and witness to a collision of Western and Eastern cultures. During his youth Zeng was inspired by China’s ’85 New Wave movement, which saw artists search for a new, often more conceptual, language after the Cultural Revolution of the s and s. Zeng closely followed and studied Western art and was particularly drawn to German Expressionism and French Romanticism, through which he observed the ways in which his predecessors processed and visualized their experiences during times of extreme societal flux. He was especially drawn to the bold expressive gestures of Max Beckmann, as well as artists such as Willem de Kooning and Edvard Munch. These influences led him to deviate from the Social Realism that he was taught in sc
Summary of Zeng Fanzhi
For over three decades Zeng Fanzhi has been working to clear a path for Chinese art that offers a frank critique of contemporary Chinese life while creating an art historical dialogue between East and West. Zeng's oeuvre shifts between portraiture of artists, of himself, and of everyday workers; abstract color fields; landscapes; and satirical figurative works. Dedicated to the utilization and representation of emotion in painting, his works are challenging, hard-hitting, and evocatively rendered reflections on political and personal worlds.
Accomplishments
- Zeng Fanzhi's most important contribution to contemporary art and painting is in his critique of communist-era Chinese propaganda, including the restrictive controls on art and artists, where Socialist Realism was the only permitted figurative painting model, featuring idealized images of political leaders and happy, healthy citizens.
- Zeng's paintings present his own hybrid identity comprised of Western and Eastern influences (artistically, personally, and stylistically) and broader East/West hybridity brought on by increasing globalization. He also often challenges Westernization and Chinese tra
zeng fanzhi:
the early years
Fall Issue
The first two decades of Zeng Fanzhi’s career offer great insights into the artist’s trajectory. Gladys Chung, editor of the artist’s catalogue raisonné, investigates these formative years.
Zeng Fanzhi with Hospital Triptych no. 1 (). Photo: Guo Shaoming
Gladys Chung is a specialist and consultant in Asian art with ten years of experience in major auction houses including Christie’s, Poly Auction, and others, and has lectured at several universities in Hong Kong. She is the Hong Kong- and Beijing-based director for the Fanzhi Foundation for Art and Education.
The first volume of Zeng Fanzhi’s catalogue raisonné will encompass the work of the first two decades of his career, from to —the first peak of his trajectory and a crucial period in the development of Chinese contemporary art. Illustrating many early works never published before, and the complete Mask Series, which was accomplished within that period, the book will also include rarely seen archival photographs and documents as well as conversations with Zeng. It will certainly provide a new and unprecedently comprehensive perspective on
Zeng Fanzhi
Zeng Fanzhi (Chinese: 曾梵志; born in Wuhan, Hubei) is a contemporary Chinese artist based in Beijing. From the earliest stages of his career, Zeng Fanzhi's paintings have been marked by their emotional directness, the artist's intuitive psychological sense, and his carefully calibrated expressionistic technique. Moving to Beijing in the early s, Zeng's art displayed an immediate shift, responding to his immersion in a more superficial environment, his seminal Mask series displaying the tensions between the artist's dominant existential concerns and an ironic treatment of the pomposity and posturing inherent to his new contemporary urban life. Throughout, Zeng's expressionistic techniques run counter to such techniques' conventional usage. That is, Zeng's representation of raw, exposed flesh or awkwardly oversized hands is not an attempt at pure emotional expression, but instead play against the superficially composed appearances of his subjects, an ironic treatment of emotional performance as a metaphor for a lost self, of stunted self-realization.
Zeng Fanzhi was born in in Wuhan, Hubei and lives and works in Beijing. He grew up during th
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