Zeng Fanzhi: The Saatchi Gallery - Art Gallery
Mood:  energetic
Topic: Arts

Zeng Fanzhi:     Zeng Fanzhi graduated from the oil painting department of Hubei Academy of Fine Arts in 1991. He moved to Beijing in 1993, and the collection of works that can be seen here reflects the transformations that have occurred in his painting during this time, and in the face of a dense, modern, and rapidly changing, capital city.

                             In the beginning of his artistic career Zeng Fanzhi painted apocalyptic, expressionist images, thus manipulating modernist compositional effects to intensify his sinister version of reality. His representational work reveals the place of the unconscious, the aberrant, in the construction of experience. The large, clenched hands of his subjects are almost more conspicuous than their stereotyped faces and wide-open eyes.

                                    To be human is to live in uncertainty, exposed to the gaze of a merciless world. There is a stark terror at the foundation of existence, coupled with a yearning for love and acceptance, or at least for a secure perch.