ZENG FANZHI (b. 1964)

Zeng Fanzhi is an artist based in Beijing, China. Zeng occupies a distinctive place within today’s group of well-known contemporary Chinese artists. Although he has often redefined his artistic style and themes, he continues to explore his personal life and feelings throughout these shifts in his aesthetic vocabulary. Zeng Fanzhi’s paintings are immediately recognisable by their signature expressionistic style, an effect that lends provocative sensations of underlying violence, psychological tension, or supernatural aura to his lavishly rendered canvases. With subjects ranging from portraits and rural landscapes to politically charged motifs, Zeng infuses the everyday veneer of shared experience with an ambience of transgression, reflective of both the rapidly changing terrain of contemporary Chinese culture and the negotiation of personal identity within this societal flux.