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Lot Essay
Zeng Fanzhi is one of China's best regarded and most versatile expressionistic painters. His earliest works focused on moody images of exaggerated figures in hospitals or butchers. Zeng established himself as a painter with his famous "Mask" series, in which his images of groups or individuals whose anxieties and conflicting emotions are hidden beneath the veneer of a cool white and inscrutable mask. Alienation and a trembling anxiety are ever-present concerns, and the artist returns again and again to basic existential fears and the nature of identity itself. More recent works witness the artist delving deeper into these themes, pursuing the tensions between metaphor and meaning, form and content.
Beginning in 2003, the artist began painting a series of portraits and self-portraits. Frequently monochromatic in color, the artist obscured the subject with his hypnotic handling of the paint, turning the surface of the work into a series of loose overlapping spirals. In his pink-hued Mao from 2003, the Great Helmsman is blurred behind Zeng's liquid surface. In contrast to official historic representations or more polemic ideological critiques, Chairman Mao here appears sweetly submerged, his meaty cheeks and pursed lips softly feminized. He is shown in extreme close-up, his features barely fitting within the frame of the composition and resembles a smiling Buddha figure as much as he does the icon of Chinese communism. It is through such experiments as these that Zeng incorporates distinctly Chinese aesthetic practices in his oil paintings, highlighting the difference between Western and Eastern practices. His "portrait" of Mao is not a traditional representation, but a portrait of an accumulation of energy, one that negates the fixity of existence even as it captures its unique fragility.
Beginning in 2003, the artist began painting a series of portraits and self-portraits. Frequently monochromatic in color, the artist obscured the subject with his hypnotic handling of the paint, turning the surface of the work into a series of loose overlapping spirals. In his pink-hued Mao from 2003, the Great Helmsman is blurred behind Zeng's liquid surface. In contrast to official historic representations or more polemic ideological critiques, Chairman Mao here appears sweetly submerged, his meaty cheeks and pursed lips softly feminized. He is shown in extreme close-up, his features barely fitting within the frame of the composition and resembles a smiling Buddha figure as much as he does the icon of Chinese communism. It is through such experiments as these that Zeng incorporates distinctly Chinese aesthetic practices in his oil paintings, highlighting the difference between Western and Eastern practices. His "portrait" of Mao is not a traditional representation, but a portrait of an accumulation of energy, one that negates the fixity of existence even as it captures its unique fragility.