Zeng Fanzhi

ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Pi Li ed., Zeng Fanzhi 1993-1998, Shenzhen, 1998, pp. 76-77, illustrated in color

This work is in generally very good condition overall. The canvas has a very minor tear in the extreme upper right and left corners of the work where it wraps around the stretchers. However the painted surface of the work is intact. Otherwise there are no apparent condition problems with this work. The work is framed and was not examined out of frame nor under UV light.
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Zeng Fanzhi was born in Wuhan in Hubei province in 1964 and attended the Hubei Academy of Fine Arts from 1987 to 1991, where he was drawn to the power and pathos of German Expressionism.  In 1993, the same year his work was included in the landmark Hong Kong exhibition China's New Art, Post-1989, Zeng moved to Beijing, the crucible of avant-garde art at that time, where he began to develop his first mature series of works based upon mask imagery during the following year.   "In the mid-'90s," the artist recently stated, "China was transforming very fast.  Chinese officials started wearing suits and ties.  Everybody wanted to look good, but it also looked a bit fake.  I felt they wanted to change themselves on the surface, and these are the feelings that I represented in the earlier Mask series.  Later on, the series used more vibrant colors; I think it makes people look even more fake, as if they are posing on a stage."[1]

The 1997 work entitled Mask Series No. 15 (Lot 77) is exemplary of Zeng's practice.  A solitary masked figure stands before the viewer, centrally positioned on the picture plane in a gray, close-cropped interior.  The non-descript, shallow environment is illuminated by a harsh spotlight from beyond the picture's right edge, which reveals itself in the high contrast clash of ruddy reds and bleached yellow of the protagonist's skin and the white highlights and dark shadows of his tight-fitting jeans.  A small white mask covers only the eyes, whose gigantic size corresponds to the figure's other swollen facial features but is otherwise matched only by the claw-like hand with which he scratches the back of his head.  Caught as though in a daydream, the exposed figure nevertheless seems anxious, like a defensive action for which he is ill-prepared may soon be required.  The dark outlines of the flesh, the scraped-on rawness of the flesh's coloration, and the marked diminution of the body in comparison to its extremeties are hallmarks of the artist's painting of the period - a style that might appear histrionically violent in the hands of a lesser artist but that in Zeng's appear natural and, at times, even restrained.  This is the palpable tension evoked in Zeng's best work, and it is no small achievement that we as viewers may be made more uncomfortable in the presence of Zeng's figures than they themselves appear to be.

Despite his now internationally acknowledged success with the Mask series, however, Zeng is exemplary in his refusal to rest upon his laurels and in his continuing pursuit of original stylistic vocabularies.  Landscapes, sometimes with figures, are the latest manifestation of Zeng's interests, and despite the radical formal departure in his efforts of recent vintage, they are no less formally resolved or original than his earlier Mask series.  In these works, of which Lots 78 and 79) are examples, Zeng renders the landscape at close range, the pictorial image only a slice or small snapshot of a greater expanse obscured from our view.  The unusual angles of the terrain are complimented by the unruly, linear brush marks of which they are composed, many of which meander in pursuit of a painterly abstraction that lies beyond the horizon of mimetic representation.  

"Sometimes I paint with two hands. Sometimes I use two brushes, sometimes four," says the artist. "With this new technique, I create and yet I destroy.  One of the brushes is creating, while the other three have nothing to do with me. I like such creation which happens by chance.  Sometime I will loose control over the image, but after you loose control you look at what you have and you try to get it back again."[2]  Zeng's descriptions of his process are akin to theories of the Romantic sublime, in which a potentially overpowering experiential awe is checked by the security of safe distance - or, in Zeng's case, the mastery of painterly control.  In the Untitled work (Lot 78), portentous gray skies streak above weighty black rocks populated with flora from the cool end of the spectrum.  In the more placid Scapes (Lot 79), red gradually descends through pink and towards white, over an untamed outcropping of blacks, blues and the occasional dash of crimson.  Instantly recognizable as landscapes and yet purely painterly in their execution, Zeng's unusual landscapes demonstrate a lyrical fluency with the medium that is highly sensual and, no doubt, enviable.

Zeng Fanzhi shows a remarkable capacity to reinvent himself and to offer vibrant, new interpretations of traditional genre categories, of which the portrait and the landscape are but two.  While Zeng's earliest works of the late '80's and early '90's focused on multi-figural groups, and might therefore be nominally classified within the hierarchy of art historical genres as "history painting" (the most celebrated genre) or so-called "genre painting" (scenes from daily life), these early works were bodied forth in an expressive painterly style not always in harmony with the subject matter itself; the result was a powerful visual language exemplary of a talent not yet bridled by the seasons of practiced experience Zeng now clearly possesses.  Not yet at mid-career but with a substantial body of diverse work behind him, Zeng's greatest achievements may still lie ahead.  What he has already accomplished, however, guarantees Zeng Fanzhi an unassailable position in the future annals of Chinese contemporary art of our era.

[1] Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop, "Zeng Fanzhi: Amid change, the art of isolation," [a review of the artist's recent retrospective exhibition at the Singapore Museum of Art, April 30 - July 11, 2007], International Herald Tribune, May 7, 2007. 

[2] Ibid.