Zeng Fanzhi 曾梵志

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About Zeng Fanzhi 曾梵志

Born in 1964 in Wuhan, China, Zeng Fanzhi developed his passion for painting at an early age. In the 1970s, artists were limited to painting politically sanctioned subjects in socialist realist styles.

Born in 1964 in Wuhan, China, Zeng Fanzhi developed his passion for painting at an early age. In the 1970s, artists were limited to painting politically sanctioned subjects in socialist realist styles. It was not until the 1980s, following the gradual opening up of the country, that Western art entered China, and Zeng was struck by the abstract and expressive works that he saw. In his third year as a student in the oil painting department at the Hubei Academy of Fine Arts, Zeng put aside socialist realism and be- gan working in a painterly vocabulary particularly influenced by Max Beckmann and other German expressionists. For his graduation piece from the Hubei Academy of Fine Arts in 1991, Zeng completed his Hospital Triptych No. 1, the first of his hospital paintings. In these paintings, Zeng portrayed the trauma and anguish of sickness and death in his images of tense hospital waiting rooms and doctor-patient encounters. Zeng was inspired to make this series because he visited the hospital next-door to him in order to use their toilets (his house did not have a bathroom), and he was struck by what he saw at the hospital each day. In 1993, Zeng moved to Beijing because he felt that he could only achieve serious recognition for his work in a more cosmopolitan city. However, after relocating to Beijing, Zeng felt alone and alienated from the friends and family he left behind in Wuhan. In response to these feelings of isolation, Zeng began the Mask series in 1994. In these paintings, he depicts well-dressed figures wearing white masks with blank, vacant expressions against flat and indescript backgrounds. Zeng has explained that these paintings were made in reaction to China’s rapid transformation in the mid-1990s. He felt that people started wearing western suits and ties to “change themselves on the surface,” and that this change felt artificial. His figures present themselves to the world in a contrived and self-conscious manner, hiding their true emotions and character behind white masks. In 2001, Zeng moved on from the Mask series and began experimenting with other styles. He completed a series of portraits with spiraling, coiled brushstrokes that obscure faces into blurry, abstracted portraits. Zeng also began a series of probing portraits that convey expressive qualities and an emotional intensity that sharply contradict the insincerity and hidden emotions of the Mask series. In 2003-4, he began experimenting with a new technique in a series of landscapes reminiscent of traditional Chinese landscape paintings. In these landscapes, Zeng creates emotionally charged, poetic images with energetic networks of lines. He paints with several brushes simultaneously, sometimes even holding two brushes in each hand, allowing spontaneity and accidental effects to abstract his images. His experimentation with line is inspired by the different strokes of traditional Chinese calligraphy and the process of learning to master these types of lines. By looking to Chinese landscapes and calligraphy for inspiration, Zeng has created a new style that blends Western expressionism with traditional Chinese influences.

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