Zeng Fanzhi - Old and New. Paintings 1988-2023

With his Mask Series, Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi became known world-wide in the mid-1990s. He painted people from the Beijing metropolis, who posed on canvas while wearing their lively but often similar facial expressions as masks. Zeng struck a nerve: the precarious balance between asserted individuality and collectivized expression related to the social conditions in China but also had identification potential in the West. The present book, which documents an exhibition at the Museum of Art Pudong in Shanghai, starts earlier, in 1988, when Zeng was an art student painting portraits in an expressionist style. Later, in the 2000s, he began a series of abstract landscapes, influenced by traditional Chinese painting, in which scrubby lines concealed ghostly figures. He quoted from Durer and van Gogh and painted dark vanitas skulls in dissolving colors. The light of his most recent Sparkling Paintings is like an exaggeration of post-impressionist perception theories-through the decades, Zeng's depiction of inner and outer states has been carried by his exploration of color as a material and medium.