Zeng Fanzhi

signed in Chinese and dated 94; signed and titled in Chinese, and dated 1994 on the reverse, framed

Private Collection
Sotheby’s, Hong Kong, 8 April, 2006, lot 533
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

China, Shanghai, Liu Hai Su Art Museum, New Interface 3 - Searching for the Future, 2007, p. 100

This work is generally in good condition. There are minor soiling around the edges and fine cracks at the folding line of the edges. Having examined the work under ultraviolet light, there appears to be no evidence of restoration.
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Please note that Untitled will be featured in Zeng Fanzhi's upcoming catalogue raisonné, published by Zeng Fanzhi Studios

Meeting Point: Man and Meat
Zeng Fanzhi

Lauded as the artist at the forefront of the Contemporary Asian art scene, it comes as no surprise that works by Zeng Fanzhi are highly coveted, as evidenced by his recent major retrospective exhibition held at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris from 2013 to 2014, and participations in group exhibitions at the Gagosian Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Zeng’s artistic forte can undeniably be attributed in part to his decade-long foray into depicting masked figures, which has elevated his status to that of “The Mask Artist”, a title that has become interchangeable with the artist’s name. Prior to his classic Mask series, however, lays the true source of Zeng’s formal recognition as an artist, a crucial time of discovery ostensibly first made by famous art critic Li Xianting in the early nineties. It is a work shortly following this critical era that is on offer in the present sale, namely Untitled (Lot 1061) from 1994, a defining piece of work not only pre-empting many of the styles that were to follow in Zeng’s oeuvre, but one that was composed at the point of transition before the now famed Mask works. An archetype of works pre-1997, Untitled is poised between styles, emanating the young artist’s fervour and verve.

 

Untitled depicts a man reclining on a bed, donning the top half of a hospital patient’s ward clothes. An engorged hand is clasped upon his chest, though the man’s passive face betrays none of his feelings—perhaps it is a first glimpse of the same passivity and impenetrability we are to expect when we turn to the stoic veiled faces in the later Mask series. On the swollen hands, Li Xianting had to remark, “All the hands in your [Zeng’s] paintings are exaggeratedly big with bulky, spastic condyles,”¹ and were often the only physical representation of emotion in Zeng’s works. This technique continued well into the Mask series, where enlarged extremities and heads represented small slivers of emotion that were otherwise undetectable on masked faces.

 

Another monstrous hand looms near the foreground of the work, as if steadying the resting figure. The man’s legs are bent at the knee, which are spindly but not long, giving one the feeling of stunted growth or malnutrition. Behind him lie two other figures, amorphous flurries of red vaguely resembling the human form. One is given a sense of the cramped and repressive atmosphere in the ward, its patients filled to the brim and offered little to no privacy.

 

Such were scenes a young Zeng was met with almost daily in his hometown of Wuhan: sick patients wheeled through grimy hospital corridors, not far from the cloying stench of meats being hung up to dry by nearby butchers. To extend an association from man to meat is befitting if not natural, which is a link that the artist most certainly sought to make. Using the same sanguineous reds that he uses in his Meat series, the metaphor of man as worthless animal, deserving nothing more than suffering and pain, comes directly to mind.

 

The subject matter of Xiehe Hospital is of course typical of Zeng’s oeuvre. For his graduate exhibition held in the summer of 1991, the artist presented a mature series of works portraying hospital scenes, where apathetic doctors operate on patients, administering pain with relish.  These same works caught the eye of Li Xianting, who would eventually select some of the young painter’s art pieces for the now monumental “China’s New Art, Post-89” exhibition, a show co-curated by Li and Johnson Chang, the director of the Hong Kong and Taiwan based Hanart TZ Gallery.

 

The present work Untitled can be interpreted along the same vein as the artist’s style from the very same exhibition, with echoes of the German Expressionists Zeng was so fond of: the sculptural qualities of Max Beckmann and the fragility of Kathe Kollwitz. Perhaps clearer however, are the influences of Francis Bacon: an almost-homage can be seen in the form of the contorted figure in the background of the piece, as well as the overall thematic preoccupation with meat itself. In various interviews with David Sylvester, Bacon mentions, “I've always been very moved by pictures about slaughterhouses and meat… we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher's shop I always think it's surprising that I wasn't there instead of the animal.”² Similarly, Zeng questions the validity and importance of human life by evoking inconsequential slabs of meat through his colour palette. Reminiscent also of Rembrandt’s works, specifically an amalgamation of The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) and Carcass of Beef (The Flayed Ox) (1657)—the latter of which is superimposed and mirrored in Francis Bacon’s Figure with Meat (1954)—the topics of man as object; as an insignificant and passive entity to be maimed and manipulated by others, can definitely be read in Untitled. The fragility of the human soul, captured in Zeng's work, is likewise reminiscent of Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Marat (1793). 

 

Striking also is Zeng’s use of a pastel blue tone, which becomes the focal point of the piece, as seen used in the clothing of the reclining man. This hue, which resurfaces only in the capacity of an accent colour in Zeng’s later works, immediately draws its audience’s attention; but at the same time, it serves to isolate the painting’s patient. This theme of alienation, which is the crux of the artist’s later Mask series, can be seen explored here, even at such an early stage.

 

According to an essay written by Li Xianting written in 1998, the development of Zeng’s oeuvre can be separated into two periods: those produced prior to and post 1997. Paintings from the former group are undoubtedly significantly fewer in number, making the present piece rare in this sense. However, even more unique is that this work serves as the meeting point of so many styles, sources and series, making Untitled an exceptional union of aesthetics. While its proximity to the Meat and Hospital series grants us an opportunity to glimpse the roots of the famous artist’s style, along with figures of stimulus, it is forward looking enough to offer a foretaste of what is to come, and what is to be expected from a world-class artist such as Zeng Fanzhi.

1 Li Xianting, “A Restless Soul: Dialogue between Li Xianting and Zeng Fanzhi”

2 David Sylvester, “'One Continuous Accident Mounting on Top of Another': An edited extract from Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester”, 1963, 1966 and 1979