Zeng Fanzhi

signed in Chinese and pinyin and dated 2004

Wedel Fine Art, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

 

London, Saatchi Gallery, The Revolution Continues: New Chinese Art, 2008, pp. 56-57, illustrated in colour 

Recent Works by Zeng Fanzhi, Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong, 2005, pp.14-15, illustrated in colour

some thick paint area was pressed, otherwise in good condition
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The spectacular career of Zeng Fanzhi is all the more so, given what looks like a morbid pessimism asserting itself from the start of his career. He belongs to an idiosyncratic, highly principled group of painters intent on making social comments that are not necessarily in keeping with party lines. Even so, the artist has had to be careful; it may well be that the mask his imagination places on everyday people may extends to cover the face of Zeng himself. Interestingly, while some Chinese artists have stuck with early inspiration and repeated their style, Zeng has gone on to work out different techniques that investigate various painterly influences just as much as they comment on the social mores of the time. He has not given up on his pessimism; the figurative studies since 2000 have, if anything, remained melancholic, even depressed. The squiggling lines drawn over the faces and bodies of his figures appear to be a technical way of indicating alienation: we look at the imposed morass of lines and wonder whether they are another way of distancing the viewer. Thus Zeng works in the space between diplomacy and discrete views of despair. His stylized figures-those done early on-remind the viewer of Soutine and Beckmann, but the later work has seen Zeng attempting to paint his way, completely on his own terms.

The painting named We No. 2 (Lot 704) offers an example of a series of works in which the features of a person are portrayed through a stylistic device: vertical rows of oval strokes that exist as columns structuring the physiognomy of a particular face. By changing the color of the paint, and to some extent the shape of the stroke itself, Zeng ends up with a recognizable portrait of someone. In the case of We No. 2, we see both the components of the macrocosm-the tight bunches of ellipses-and the macrocosm-the figure's face-at the same time. Here a face looks intently back at us; the man's eyes are wide, his nose is sharply defined by light and shadow, and his mouth is sensual and slightly parted. Zeng's audience remembers that the title of the series is "We": it is a significant that Zeng indicates he is painting a history of his fellow Chinese, even as he uses a formal device that speaks to Western abstraction. Worthy of note is that the "We" series marks the beginning of the swirling brushstrokes and concrete, if obscured, historical subject matter that populate Zeng Fanzhi's canvases up to the present. At Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2006, he showed two massive works depicting a Chinese hero of the Korean War hiding in a bush rendered in the manner first set forth in "We." His abstractions, ever bolder and bigger, have come more and more to rely on this same swirling motif, culminating in the chaotic brushstroke that seems to increasingly dominate his works of late. 

The large oil entitled Tiananmen (Lot 705) is a fine example of the artist's versatile deployment of that very brushstroke.  The painting shows Mao's portrait over a central government building. The Chairman's bland countenance is at one, figuratively and literally, with red flags mounted on the edifice, with a pale sky fading into a dark blue at the top of the painting.  Mao-that frequent icon of Chinese contemporary artists-is rarely depicted in Zeng's work, and even here, his painterly lens is such that the subject's identity is not immediately apparent. The overall composition manages to riff on the omnipresence of Mao's image and influence without celebrating or deriding it in the manner of the usual "Political Pop" strategies. It represents a peace with Mao made after the spiritual upheavals of the early 1990s, from the comfort of a new and newly prosperous era. The great helmsman in these works, as in Chinese society generally, a subliminal presence, at once seen and unseen.  The apparition that seems to levitate simultaneously in front of and within Tiananmen suggests that the captain of China's revolutions remains important as a figure who transformed its culture, in ways that resonate on and on.  Faced with taking a specific side, Zeng demurs, but not without raising, once again, the spectre of history.