Zeng Fanzhi | Items for sale, auction results and history

Zeng Fanzhi is a Beijing-based Chinese artist who has created some of the most iconic images in contemporary Chinese art. Zeng is best known for his ‘Mask Series’, where he employs painterly techniques and a singular mask motif to encompass the uncertainties encountered amid the rapid changes brought on by urbanisation in China.

Zeng was born in Wuhan, China in 1964. In 1991, he graduated from the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts, where he studied Western art and philosophy and experimented with Social Realist techniques, all of which informed his earliest series of paintings — the ‘Hospital Triptychs’ and ‘Meat’. Zeng depicted his human figures in fleshy and compassionate brushstrokes, capturing the excruciating pain of his subjects. These early works set the stage for his profoundly personal painting practice.

In November 2013, Hospital Triptych No.3 (1992) sold for $14,605,771 at Christie’s, making it the most expensive ‘Hospital’ work ever sold at auction.

In 1994, Zeng moved to Beijing, where he saw the effects of urbanisation on the city. He shifted his focus to businessmen and the middle classes and debuted his ‘Mask Series’. Inspired by figurative painters such as Francis Bacon, Zeng employed a palette knife to create his depictions of well-dressed bourgeois characters wearing face masks. The paintings highlight the tensions between the individual and society, the external and internal self.

A career breakthrough, the ‘Mask Series’ affiliated him with Cynical Realism — a movement coined by the art critic Li Xianting in the early 1990s. Other contemporary Chinese artists associated with the movement include Fan Lijun and Yue Minjun.

Since 1996, Zeng has explored a more abstract and expressive portraiture, where his subjects reveal their faces and genuine expression.

Another genre Zeng works extensively in is abstract landscape. For his monumental landscape paintings, Zeng often employs two brushes dipped in different paints and holds them like a pair of chopsticks to create gestural mark-making that forms a web of lines. His landscapes inherit the same dazzling energy of his portraiture. ‘They are not real landscape…They are rather about an experience of marvellous revelation.’ Zeng says.

For over a decade, Zeng has developed his landscape series to probe the enduring tension between nature and humanity.