Zeng Fanzhi: Old and New Paintings 1988-2023

The Chinese painter Zeng Fanzhi became world-renowned in the mid-1990s with his mask paintings. He depicted people from the metropolis of Beijing, who posed on canvas, wearing their vibrant yet often similar facial expressions as masks. Here, Zeng struck a chord: the precarious balance between claimed individuality and collectivized expression could be related to the social conditions in China and also held potential for identification in the West. The present book, which documents an exhibition at the Museum of Art Pudong in Shanghai, starts earlier, when the art student Zeng began painting portraits in an expressionist style in 1988. In the 2000s, influenced by traditional Chinese painting, he began a series of abstract landscapes made of tangled lines that concealed ghostly figures. He referenced Dürer and van Gogh, painting dark Vanitas skulls in dissolved colors. The light in his recent Sparkling Paintings is akin to an exaggeration of post-impressionist perception theory—through the decades, Zeng's representation of inner and outer states is driven by his engagement with color as both material and medium. In collaboration with the Museum of Art Pudong.