Zeng Fanzhi

signed in Chinese and pinyin and dated 2000

Some minor paint cracks and abrasion along the edges but otherwise generally in very good condition.
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Of all the signature motifs that populate contemporary Chinese art, Zeng Fanzhi's Masks are among the most powerful and expressive. These figures, their skin—but, crucially, not their exaggerated facial contours—hidden from public view, occupied Zeng's creative energies for an eight-year period that ran from 1994 into the early years of the present decade. Sotheby's is here pleased to offer one of the finest examples of the late period of that series, a rare tall and narrow single-figure Mask dated 2000.

Zeng Fanzhi's Mask series is remarkable for the intensity with which it continued to evolve throughout its duration, right until its abrupt end. While the mask became a symbol, even an icon, the works comprising this series each bear the unique design of their maker, having never devolved into formula or repetition. The present work, coming from a moment close to the end of the series, stands almost as a distillation of the works that preceded it: the masked figure hovers solitary, shin-deep in water against an empty horizon, clad in a simple set of undergarments. Where preceding examples of this series have focused conspicuously on details such as shiny shoes, animal companions, neckties, or farcical backgrounds, Mask Series (2000) (Lot 343), instantiates the masked man in his simplest, most direct form. In this way, it works as something of a meta-commentary on the works that preceded it. Its palette hearkens back to the meat-rich fantasias of Zeng's early work, while its intense brushwork foreshadows an imminent change in style that would draw him into a realm of increasingly abstract portraiture.

Critics including Karen Smith and Lü Peng trace the emergence of the fabled mask as a motif in Zeng Fanzhi's work to his move from Wuhan to Beijing. Zeng's hometown Wuhan is also the site of the Hubei Academy of Fine Arts, his alma mater, which was then home to a healthy node in the national conversation over contemporary art that was in full swing. From this major city still beyond the immediate pressures of Beijing and Shanghai, influential critic Pi Daojian edited the magazine Art Trends (Meishu Sichao), and Wang Guangyi, then a young champion of the '85 New Wave movement, taught his doctrine that "rationalism must eclipse sentimentality" in the art of a newly self-reflexive China. Zeng reveled in the heady atmosphere of his hometown, where he began to discover the distinct expressionist style that would form the basis for his early works in the Meat and Hospital series, and gain him the attention of major critics and curators such as Li Xianting. Li went on to include him as one of the youngest artists in the China's New Art: Post-1989 exhibition he was curating with Johnson Chang, and Pi Daojian nominated him for the 1992 Guangzhou Biennale where he won a major prize.

After his graduation Zeng Fanzhi worked briefly for an advertising agency in Wuhan, producing commercial art for a consumer economy that was just beginning to stir. His decision, in early 1993, to move with his new bride to Beijing was a move of necessary boldness and courage. The artist recounts a now-famous story in which his mother, upon hearing of his departure for the capital, presented him with 100 kilos of grain vouchers, with the caveat, "these are so you will not starve to death; everything else is up to you." Arriving in a Beijing art scene then beginning its long recovery from the end of the 1980s, Zeng was struck by the phoniness that surrounded him, both from the artists then vying for the very limited attention of a Western system that had yet to take serious interest in China, and from the urbanites looking for their precarious places in a constantly changing city.

Zeng Fanzhi's masks work differently from the bloodlines of Zhang Xiaogang or the eerie smiles of Yue Minjun. Seen especially in light of the artist's more recent work, the mask years emerge as a key phase of transition and maturation, rather than the culmination of decades of earlier exploration. For one thing, Zeng Fanzhi is a decade younger than the artists in whose company he is often placed. He entered art school not in the post-Cultural Revolution darkness of the late 1970s, but at the dawn of a new period of exploration and openness brought on by what has now been deemed the '85 New Wave, in reference to the proliferation of new styles and movements suddenly in vogue in the rapidly reforming China of the 1980s. This half-generation difference meant quite a lot for Zeng's development, particularly that he was among the first contemporary Chinese artists to deal not with the themes of grief and coping over the historical tragedy of the Cultural Revolution, but to put his observational and representational energies in the service of a critique of the new society taking shape around him. The mask is precisely such a device.