Zeng Fanzhi: Parcours @ Ullens Center for Contemporary Art - UCCA, Beijing

Zeng Fanzhi: Parcours
Ullens Center for Contemporary Art - UCCA, Beijing
Through 19 November 2016

Through 19 November 2016, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (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 thé 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 Lucian 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 Chinese painting, and in the Nave, where a special space has been constructed to show two of his most substantial landscapes.

Its title inspired by that of an early painting he completed in 1990, "Zeng Fanzhi: Parcours" offers to bring the viewer along on the artist's creative journey. A key figure in the generation of artists who emerged, along with the very notion of "Contemporary Chinese Art," onto the world stage of the early 1990s, Zeng Fanzhi has consistently used his works to reflect on the social and cultural climate of his country through a highly personal visual language. His early paintings, completed during the late 1980s while he was a student at the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts, combine the pedagogical apparatus of socialist realism with a romantic interest in Western classicism and modernism to depict new realities of Reform-era Chinese society. Following his arrival on the Beijing scene in the early-1990s, Zeng Fanzhi quickly gained recognition for his "Masks" series, which gives symbolic form to the dichotomies and affectations of that era through figures in varying states of alienation. After this, Zeng Fanzhi continued his research info painting itself, producing the strikingly colored, tensely vibrating, monumentally scaled canvases of the "Abstract Landscapes" series. In recent years, he has combined the free-range brushstrokes of these landscapes with homages to works by masters including Leonardo DaVinci and Albrecht Durer, in a series of seven four-by-four-meter paintings that have been extensively exhibited abroad. The newest works in this exhibition consist of a grouping of paintings in ink on paper which signal an introspective shift in his practice. Today Zeng fulfills a role inhabited by artists throughout Chinese history: an aesthete among the worldly, offering uplift and solace through refinement.

Its design carefully authored by the artist's longtime collaborators Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, "Zeng Fanzhi: Parcours" rhythmically divides the expanse of UCCA's Great Hall into an immersive survey of his career. Six freestanding walls, each punctuated by a 2.4-meter square window, thoughtfully connect major shifts in the artist's practice. They are enclosed by a series of darker walls that run around the space's perimeter, chronologically presenting portraits from ail phases of Zeng's career. Having sought to avoid enclosed spaces, Tadao Ando has likened this layout to sections of an MRI scan that allow viewers to walk through layers of the artist's mind.

UCCA Director and exhibition curator Philip Tinari states, "UCCA is hugely excited to be presenting Zeng Fanzhi's most comprehensive exhibition to date anywhere in the world. His singular painterly vision connects his personal experience of living in contemporary China to centuries of artistic creation across many cultures, as art becomes a vehicle for exploring history and articulating taste. This exhibition offers not only an overview of his considerable talent, but a meditation on the importance of aesthetic cultivation in a messy world."

Regarding his survey, Zeng Fanzhi states, "Fortunately, I encountered painting in my youth and chose to embark on this creative path that now stretches for nearly thirty years. Along the way, I have discovered a place I call my own, where art serves as a guide through the long corridor of history, allowing one to traipse freely through time and space. My heart is filled with gratitude for the wonderment of this experience, and I hope by presenting this exhibition, which incorporates canvases from ail the major shifts in my practice, to share a fantastic visual journey with a global audience."

UCCA
Ullens Center for Contemporary Art
www.ucca.org.cn

Zeng Fanzhi @ Gagosian New York : Paintings, Drawings, and Two Sculptures

ZENG FANZHI:
Paintings, Drawings, and Two Sculptures
Gagosian Gallery, New York
November 6 - December 23, 2015

ZENG FANZHI 

Blue, 2015

Oil on canvas, 157 1/2 × 275 9/16 inches (400 × 700 cm) 

© Zeng Fanzhi Studio

Gagosian New York presents paintings, sculpture, and works on paper by Zeng Fanzhi. This is his first exhibition with the gallery in New York, following major exhibitions at Gagosian Hong Kong (2011) and Gagosian London (2012).

Zeng Fanzhi is at the forefront of a generation of Chinese artists who have achieved national and international prominence in the wake of the Cultural Revolution of the 1970s. Over the past three decades he has probed the place of the unconscious in the construction of human experience while reflecting on the collective national psyche in the face of broad and accelerated change. In his formative years, he was particularly inspired by the works of German Expressionism and French Romanticism, in which he found precedents for exploring the psychology of selfhood in the throes of societal flux. His searing Hospital Triptych No. 1 (1991), an early example of his virtuosic application of historical styles and techniques to interpret contemporary national realities, was shown in the pivotal exhibition “China's New Art, Post-1989” at the Hong Kong Arts Center in 1993.

With time, Zeng Fanzhi has tempered the direct impact of Western Expressionism with the local influence of traditional guohua painting methods. His eloquent and confrontational work is charged with melancholy, unfolding in a succession of dystopic themes, both introspective and overtly socially critical. After the nightmarish Hospital paintings came the visceral Meat paintings that juxtapose figures with butchered flesh; then the enigmatic Mask paintings that treated social alienation; and the densely skeined landscapes with their obscured figures, alluding to the Taoist perception of human transience within nature's boundless permanence. With the painting From 1830 till now No. 4 (2014), exhibited at the Musée du Louvre last year, Zeng Fanzhi depicts Eugene Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830) as a neglected stone monument in an overgrown thicket.

Recent paintings include large-scale nocturnal landscapes, some populated by anonymous figures or identifiable historical subjects; and smaller, more abstract canvases in which schematic black branches stand out in sharp relief against backgrounds of sweeping horizontal brushstrokes. In the landscape paintings, traditional techniques blend seamlessly with modern abstraction: in an idiosyncratic method originally adopted out of necessity due to injury, Zeng sometimes works with multiple brushes in each hand, undermining his own precision through a process that has become a continuous cycle of creation and destruction. The “abstract landscape” paintings evolve as if autonomously through the rhythmic processual vitality with which Zeng Fanzhi approaches his persistent motifs. Invoking a lineage beginning with Song Dynasty depictions of idyllic, imaginary vistas rendered in calligraphic strokes, he envisages vast scenes of bleak terrains spontaneously lit with bright pinks and blues, and eclipsed by jagged black branches, graphic in their concise and sinister silhouettes.

In the cast metal sculptures, the tree, a symbol of growth and aspiration, is reduced to the melancholic figure of a single gnarled and wintry limb. For the first time, Zeng will show related mixed-media drawings, developed over many years.

Other paintings juxtapose carefully adapted art-historical subjects with spontaneous brushwork, oscillating between a meticulous cut-and-paste sensibility and gestural mark-making. An exacting close-up of Laocoön's head—an homage to the classical Western depiction of agonizing ordeal—is cast against a mercurial, nebulous sky; while a Nativity scene is partially obscured by yellow paint drips against a dark landscape. Depicting Greco-Roman and Christian subjects and motifs within fields that merge restrained traditional Chinese techniques with the unleashed energies of action painting, Zeng has forged a poignant, potent, and topical expressionism that reaches across culture and history.

A fully illustrated book is published to document the exhibition.

ZENG FANZHI was born in Wuhan, China in 1964, and lives and works in Beijing. Solo museum exhibitions include “Zeng Fanzhi: Idealism,” Singapore Art Museum (2007); “Zeng Fanzhi,” Musée d'Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne de Metropole (2007); “Zeng Fanzhi,” Fundacion Godia, Barcelona (2009); and “2010: Zeng Fanzhi,” Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2010). Zeng's work was the subject of a major retrospective at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2013–14. In a specially commissioned exhibition at the Musée du Louvre in 2014, his painting From 1830 till now No. 4 (2014) was shown alongside Eugene Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830). Zeng's work was included in the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009); “The World Belongs to You,” Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2011–12); “Passage to History: 20 Years of La Biennale di Venezia and Chinese Contemporary Art,” Arsenale di Venezia and Museum of Contemporary Art Chengdu (2013); “Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2013–14); and “Post Pop: East Meets West,” Saatchi Gallery, London (2014–15).

GAGOSIAN GALLERY, NEW YORK
555 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011
www.gagosian.com

Expo Zeng Fanzhi, Paris, MAM, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris

Exposition Zeng Fanzhi 
Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris 
Jusqu'au 16 février 2014 

Le Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris présente la première rétrospective française du peintre chinois ZENG FANZHI. Aussi bien reconnu par les collectionneurs que par le milieu institutionnel, Zeng Fanzhi utilise depuis les années 1990 un langage original, marqué par son évidente filiation à l’art asiatique ainsi que par les nombreuses influences occidentales parvenues jusqu’à lui. C’est au travers de cette écriture totale que le regardeur se souvient de la tradition du paysage dans la peinture chinoise, tout autant qu’il pense à Warhol, Bacon, Balthus ou Pollock. 

ZENG FANZHI

Portrait, 2004

200 x 150 cm

Collection de l’artiste 

© Zeng Fanzhi Studio

Cependant, l’oeuvre de Zeng Fanzhi peut difficilement être réduite à une assimilation de parangons traditionnels et modernistes. En ayant multiplié les styles et les thématiques, l’artiste fait preuve d’une volonté de recherche, tant picturale qu’intellectuelle, et d’une technique contrôlée. La confrontation à ces toiles laisse le spectateur seul face à une infinité, comme une étreinte dans le monde intérieur de l’artiste.

L’oeuvre de Zeng Fanzhi mélange histoire de la Chine et histoire personnelle. Ses souvenirs de jeunesse, lorsqu’il vivait près de l’hôpital de Wuhan, marque la première série de toiles qui représentent opérations, salles d’attente, viandes et corps dévêtus. D’autres toiles des années 2000 rappellent le passé politique de la Chine, comme Tian’An Men (2004) où l’on reconnaît Mao. 

ZENG FANZHI

Tian’An Men, 2004

215 x 330 cm

Kai Feng Foundation

© Zeng Fanzhi studio

ZENG FANZHI

Mask Series No.6, 1996

200 x 360 cm (en 2 panneaux)

Collection privée

© Zeng Fanzhi studio

Et si les tableaux appartenant aux Mask Series sont encore sous l’influence du Pop Art, les récents portraits et paysages s’approchent d’une abstraction plus sombre. Ces polyptyques gigantesques, barrés de ronces d’où fourmillent animaux et corps humains, sont d’un expressionnisme contenu qui se réfère à la peinture allemande et en particulier à celle de Dürer. 

ZENG FANZHI

Hare, 2012

400 x 400 cm (en 2 panneaux)

Pinault Collection

© Zeng Fanzhi studio

Cette exposition est l’occasion de découvrir l’ensemble de la carrière de Zeng Fanzhi, à travers un accrochage à rebours, d’une quarantaine de toiles et de sculptures de 2013 à 1990. A la suite de plusieurs expositions monographiques (The National Gallery for Foreign Art, Sofia, 2010 ; Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, 2010 ; Francisco Godia Foundation, Barcelone, 2009 ; Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne Métropole, France, 2007), le Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris propose une lecture de cet oeuvre conçue en étroite collaboration avec l’artiste. 

ZENG FANZHI est né en 1964 à Wuhan (Chine). Formé à l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts de sa ville natale, il découvre durant ces années d’enseignement l’art contemporain, chinois et occidental. Nourri par ces influences et soucieux de connaître un contexte plus effervescent, il part s’installer en 1993 à Pékin où il vit et travaille depuis. 

Un catalogue, largement illustré et édité par Paris-Musées, est publié à cette occasion. Prix : 30 euros.

Commissaire de l’exposition : François Michaud avec Marine Guyé

L’exposition est réalisée avec le soutien de la Fondation Yuz.

Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris
11 avenue du Président Wilson - 75116 Paris
www.mam.paris.fr