NEW YORK, NY.- Zeng’s diverse and innovative painting practice has established him as one of the world’s most celebrated living artists. In a career spanning over three decades to date, Zeng repeatedly challenges convention to constantly evolve his practice, resulting in artistic breakthroughs, versatile painting styles, and a rich oeuvre. He has shaped the course of Chinese contemporary art by redefining the principles of painting, as well as by creating opportunities and securing a future for Chinese art through the work of The Fanzhi Foundation for Art and Education, which was founded in 2011 and continues to be funded by Zeng today.
Hauser & Wirth will further develop the artist’s international profile through a series of major exhibitions, public programs, publishing projects, and through the commissioning of new scholarship. Together the gallery and the artist will launch initiatives that place a strong emphasis on education and academic pursuit – in addition to representing the artist, Hauser & Wirth will establish an ongoing collaboration with The Fanzhi Foundation, which supports and promotes art and cultural related events in conjunction with a range of institutions worldwide.
Hauser & Wirth’s first exhibition project with Zeng will take place in fall this year. A number of academic events – including international symposia – are also being planned to coincide with the publication of a comprehensive catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work: Volume 1, documenting the first 20 years (1984 – 2004) of Zeng’s career, will be released in summer 2018. In addition to an in-depth collaboration with Hauser & Wirth, the artist will continue a relationship and professional exchange with his existing galleries.
Zeng’s joining Hauser & Wirth marks an important step in the gallery’s increasing global reach as their first permanent space in Asia opens on 26 March 2018 across two floors of the new H Queen’s development in Hong Kong.
Iwan Wirth, President and Co-Founder of Hauser & Wirth, says: ‘I have admired Zeng Fanzhi’s painting for very many years, and I really could not be more thrilled to announce our collaboration. I am excited to have the opportunity to exhibit and promote Zeng to our global network, and to craft a strong legacy for his astounding work. On the eve of Hauser & Wirth’s opening in China, I am pleased that Zeng will be taking this next important step along with us.
Together Zeng and I have enjoyed stimulating conversations about our shared belief in the importance of scholarship, and our hopes for the future of contemporary art. We look forward to working together to create educational opportunities for artists and art lovers everywhere.’
Zeng Fanzhi says: ‘Art creation has brought me a lot: through art I experienced the nuanced changes of human sensation under diverse social circumstances as well as the relationships between the individual and history, between culture and country. Creation is a tool of mine, it is the way I connect with the world. As an artist under the influences of different cultures, my hope is that my art reflects the social and aesthetic experience of an individual in the present time.
Hauser & Wirth has demonstrated its open and progressive vision in its past undertakings, especially in representing artists of different nationalities and backgrounds. What impressed me is the individual support structure and in-depth research that they devote to every artist. This will be a lasting contribution to the future of contemporary art. I look forward to our collaboration.’
Zeng Fanzhi was born in Wuhan, China in 1964 and graduated from the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts in Wuhan in 1991. One of the most celebrated artists working today, Zeng is lauded across the globe for his technical mastery and ability to conjure emotion from his subject matter. He lives and works in Beijing.
During his early education in Wuhan Zeng immersed himself in Western art, philosophy, and the Social Realist techniques of the 1985 New Wave movement in China. These interests informed his earliest series of paintings, Meat Series and Hospital Triptychs. Both bodies of work are characterized by an approach that is at once objective and tender. Zeng renders human figures as merely slabs of pink and red flesh indeterminable from the animal carcasses that surround them, while also capturing the agonizing pain of his subjects with an empathetic brush. These early works between 1989 and 1994 set the stage for an intensely personal and expressive painting practice that documents a prolific period of social and economic development in Chinese history.
Working in the wake of rapid modernization and urbanization in China, Zeng turned his attention to figures from the industries around him, and began to paint businessmen and politicians, always wearing masks so as to disguise human pain and agony behind a ‘socially acceptable’ face. Inspired by artists as diverse as Francis Bacon, Willem De Kooning, Max Beckmann, these works, known as the Mask and Behind the Mask series, straddle realism and imagination to reveal a meticulous attention to technical detail, merged with a free and expressionistic style of painting.
Following a period of critical and commercial success, Zeng made the conscious decision to move away from formal figuration and rules guarding composition and representational painting, and entered into a new exploration of abstraction and expressive portraiture. In 1996 he embarked on a new series, removing the coverings from his subjects’ faces to reveal their raw emotion and the reality of their suffering.
Over the past two decades, Zeng has reacquainted himself with traditional Chinese ink painting, and art particularly from the Northern Wei to Song and Yuan Dynasties from the fourth to fifteenth centuries. Informed by these new interests, Zeng has moved further into abstraction, creating highly gestural landscapes that share the same dynamic energy of his portraiture. These canvases are traversed by lines, blending with and obscuring the legible objects in the background. Zeng has said of this work: ‘They are not real landscapes. They are rather about an experience of miao wu [marvelous revelation],a restless journey of discovery.’ Over the past 10 years, Zeng has developed this series to investigate the complex tension between nature, wildlife, and humanity.
In parallel to his experimentations with ‘landscape’ painting, Zeng continued to forge ahead with a more experimental language in his portraiture studies: the We series comprises distorted faces painted at extremely close range, employing large, circular brushstrokes that create a frenzied and urgent presence. These paintings are produced by a method that requires intense physical involvement: Zeng uses his entire body, stretching across the breadth of these large-scale canvases to apply color with multiple paintbrushes simultaneously.
Zeng Fanzhi has exhibited at a number of international museums. Recent solo exhibitions include: ‘Zeng Fanzhi | Van Gogh,’ Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (2017); ‘Zeng Fanzhi: Parcours,’ the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2016); ‘Zeng Fanzhi,’ Musée du Louvre, Paris (2014); ‘Zeng Fanzhi,’ Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris (2013); ‘Zeng Fanzhi,’ Punta della Dogana, Venice (2013); ‘Zeng Fanzhi: Being,’ Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, Hong Kong (2011); ‘2010 Zeng Fanzhi,’ The Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2010); ‘Zeng Fanzhi,’ The National Gallery of Foreign Art, Sofia (2010); ‘Zeng Fanzhi,’ Singapore Art Museum, Singapore (2007); and ‘Zeng Fanzhi,’ Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai (2003).
