Zeng Fanzhi - Punta della Dogana, Venise (English, French, Italian edition)

Zeng Fanzhi was born in 1964 in Wuhan, a densely populated city of Southern China and a nerve centre of the country. There, as young man, he experienced the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the propaganda of Mao’s regime. Today he lives and works in Beijing.

In the mid 1990s, Zeng produced a series of paintings in which the characters wear white masks with big smiles, all the same, and which are disturbingly fused with the facial features. Tinged with hints of German Expressionism, these representations of the occidentalization of Chinese society bear witness to the loss of historical and social references, the solitude and alienation of a people that has now chosen individualism.

In his more recent paintings of landscapes, such as the two works titled The Land So Rich in Beauty (2010), the artist moves away from the representation of the human figure to come closer to abstraction, produced with an expressionist technique.