Sky

Zeng Fanzhi was born in Wuhan in the Hubei Province in 1964. Unlike the majority of Chinese painters working today, Zeng's paintings are psychologically driven rather than politically. At the beginning of his career in the early '90s, Zeng Fanzhi's paintings depicted apocalyptic, expressionist imagery, which seemed to represent the artist's sinister view of reality. Austere images of slaughterhouses and hospital scenes featuring sadistic doctors were a common theme. In his more recent series of paintings, however, to which Sky belongs, Zeng replicates the emotional and psychological strain of the individual's experience in contemporary society. The existential images of a lone figure standing in nature, gazing absently off into the distance with his hands stuffed in his pockets, symbolizes the sense of alienation and detachment triggered by the overwhelming rush to acquire and consume in modern day China.

Something Zeng once said of his earlier works seems to apply even more poignantly for these fragile examinations of the inner psyche: "Painting is a painful process; it forces the human figures in my painting into a state of pain and anxiety. I paint images of people in tragic situations, and they express everything that I want to express" (Zeng quoted in V. C. Doran, China's New Art, Post-1989, exh. cat., Hanart/TZ Gallery, Honk Kong 1993, p. 148).