Zeng Fanzhi

Zeng Fanzhi (born 1964) is a contemporary Chinese artist based in Beijing.

Zeng's works have been praised as possessing an emotional directness, an intuitive psychological sense, and a carefully calibrated expressionistic technique.

Born and raised in Wuhan, Zeng was interested primarily in painting and drawing from a young age, and did poorly in school.

His earliest works are large-scale abstract paintings.

Zeng was born in 1964 in Wuhan, Hubei.

He grew up during the Cultural Revolution and dropped out of high school.

He later attended Hubei Institute of Fine Arts (HIFA), where he was influenced by Expressionism.

Zeng became one of the most popular artists of his era, in addition to being one of the most financially successful in Asia.

Zeng was in Hubei Institute of Fine Arts from 1987 to 1991, and paid a particular interest in German expressionist painters.

During his third year of schooling, he began instead to learn more about the actual approaches that the expressionists would take to painting.

By the time his first show came to fruition, it was apparent that he had gained his very own style and the work gained him a large amount of respect in the Chinese art scene.

Romantic paintings, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, pop art and Chinese traditional painting have all influenced Zeng's art at different times in his career, but his work is most heavily influenced by his physical and emotional circumstances.

His Hospital series, inspired by the scenes he witnessed in the local clinic near where he lived, is considered among his major early achievements, as well as the "meat" series.

Both series are influenced by German Expressionism, unlike the landscapes and portraits generally done by his classmates.

In his Hospital series, Zeng moved to a theme that included the use of hospital interiors, where he devoted much of the detail to the patients' moods and the power that certain brush stroking techniques could yield.

These paintings often hinted at a sadomasochistic relationship in the world with his pale colors and blood colored flesh of the patients.

In using these techniques, he shows a somewhat pessimistic view of the world.

His expressionist technique shined through in these works further with an extreme expression in the eyes of the characters.

Also, the hands of the patients are notably oversized and the joints are much larger as well.

The scenes he depicts seem to show patients caught up in seeming hysteria, and the deep red colors show anger of sorts.

Moving to Beijing in the early 1990s, Zeng's art became a response to this immersion in what he viewed as a more superficial environment, with his seminal Mask series displaying the tensions between the artist's dominant existential concerns and the pomposity and posturing of his new contemporary urban life (which is depicted ironically).

Throughout, Zeng's expressionistic techniques run counter to such techniques' conventional usage.

That is, Zeng's representation of raw, exposed flesh or awkwardly oversized hands is not an attempt at pure emotional expression, but instead play against the superficially composed appearances of his subjects, an ironic treatment of emotional performance as a metaphor for a lost self, of stunted self-realization.

Zeng has lived and worked in Beijing since 1993 and has been exhibited in venues such as the Shanghai Art Museum, National Art Museum of China, Kunst Museum Bonn, Kunstmuseum Bern, Santa Monica Art Centre, Art Centre, and Le Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris.

After 1994, Zeng's work shifted toward his Mask series in which his style takes a drastic shift that is considered the second period in his work.

Instead of the anger and brutal nature of the hospital series, the Mask series is more apathetic.

The scenes are painted from a distance, and have a mask of some sort as the center of focus.

The groups are often small or include a single person, and that seems to show that Zeng is touching on personal relationships and the fact that society is filled with false relationships.

By using a mask, even if a person is with a group, there is a sense of solitude for the person wearing the mask.

He also explores new techniques that include using a palette knife as a paintbrush.

This causes the characters to have an even more blurred edge to them, which essentially masks the painting as a whole.

The lighting on the paintings are not coming from an obvious source, and the characters seem to be separated from the world around them through an awkward placement in the background.

Through the different techniques, the characters seem much more calm than his earlier hospital series.

The figures' hands are in fists and also much more realistic and apparent than in the past, and this causes them to seem as though they are controlling an emotion instead of venting anger, etc. The Mask series received wide acclaim from critics and made him a multimillion dollar artist.

The art by Zeng after 1997 becomes much more stylish through the incorporation of new types of backgrounds like the sea.

He uses softer colors that are more blended into each other and this makes for a more comfortable viewing experience.

The same piece had been sold to an American tourist for $16,000 in 1998.

Popular mostly with foreign collectors at first, Chinese buyers of Zeng's work rose in the mid-2000s.

He has been described as an "icon of the art world", and is often considered China's greatest living artist.

In May 2008, he set a world auction record when "Mask Series 1996 No. 6", one of his contemporary Chinese art pieces, was sold for $9.7 million in Hong Kong.