Zeng fan zhi artist medium
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Works Exhibited
About
Zeng Fanzhi’s visually and historically complex paintings reflect his modig experimentation with, and fusion of, Eastern and Western artistic traditions.
Born and raised in Wuhan, China, Zeng graduated from the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts, Wuhan, in 1991. From the nineteenth century until the 1990s, Wuhan was one of China’s most prosperous cities and witness to a collision of Western and Eastern cultures. During his youth Zeng was inspired by China’s ’85 New Wave movement, which saw artists search for a new, often more conceptual, language after the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Zeng closely followed and studied Western art and was particularly drawn to German Expressionism and French Romanticism, through which he observed the ways in which his predecessors processed and visualized their experiences during times of extreme societal flux. He was especially dra
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Summary of Zeng Fanzhi
For over three decades Zeng Fanzhi has been working to clear a path for Chinese art that offers a frank critique of contemporary Chinese life while creating an art historical dialogue between East and West. Zeng's oeuvre shifts between portraiture of artists, of himself, and of everyday workers; abstract color fields; landscapes; and satirical figurative works. Dedicated to the utilization and representation of emotion in painting, his works are challenging, hard-hitting, and evocatively rendered reflections on political and personal worlds.
Accomplishments
- Zeng Fanzhi's most important contribution to contemporary art and painting is in his critique of communist-era Chinese propaganda, including the restrictive controls on art and artists, where Socialist Realism was the only permitted figurative painting model, featuring idealized images of political leaders and happy, healthy citizens.
- Zeng's paintings present his own hybrid identity comprised of West
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Zeng Fanzhi
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.
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 s