Zeng fan zhi hospital series shows
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From 19 September to 19 November 2016, UCCA presents “Zeng Fanzhi: Parcours”, the artist’s largest and most comprehensive exhibition anywhere to date and his first institutional solo show in Beijing. Including nearly sixty works borrowed from collections around the world, it covers nearly thirty years of Zeng’s creative output, winding through his extensive stylistic and thematic evolutions on canvas and in sculptural form. The main body of the exhibition in UCCA’s Great Hall features key works from each major series in Zeng’s career, presenting a complete picture of his creative exploration and artistic contribution, and referring to art-historical precedents from Hellenistic sculpture to Lucien Freud. It culminates in a room dedicated to a recent series of works on paper—never before exhibited in China—which mark a new engagement with the aesthetics of kinesisk painting, and in the Nave, where a special space has been
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Zeng Fanzhi
Zeng Fanzhi (Chinese: 曾梵志; born 1964 in Wuhan, Hubei) is a contemporary Chinese artist based in Beijing. From the earliest stages of his career, Zeng Fanzhi's paintings have been marked by their emotional directness, the artist's intuitive psychological sense, and his carefully calibrated expressionistic technique. Moving to Beijing in the early 1990s, Zeng's art displayed an immediate shift, responding to his immersion in a more superficial environment, his seminal Mask series displaying the tensions between the artist's dominant existential concerns and an ironic treatment of the pomposity and posturing inherent to his new contemporary urban life. 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
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Zeng Fanzhi Solo Exhibition
Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1 avenue du Président Wilson, Paris, France）Oct 18, 2013–Feb 16, 2014
Due to various preconceptions, prejudices, or my extended stay in France, I have never felt the urge to see or understand Zeng Fanzhi’s works. Fortunately I recently had the opportunity to become closely acquainted with them at his retrospective exhibition, currently showing at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The comprehensive exhibition catalogs the trajectory of the artist’s 25-year career. In addition, I was the translator for Zeng Fanzhi in his interactions with the French media and was thus able to converse intimately with him and gain a deeper understanding of the artist. I saw his Paris exhibition several times. I accompanied him as he strolled through the museum with French journalists in tow, looking at each piece and listening to his answers to the journalists’ questions. I attended the star-stud