Zeng Fanzhi: The Story through Art of a State of Mind
The years of the ’85 movement saw the beginning of the modern art fever that swept across the entire art scene of mainland China. Now these heady years suddenly seem like the distant past. Among the very talented young artists I knew, some have left for faraway countries, and although others remained in China desperately hoping to ‘position’ Chinese contemporary art they mostly felt lost.[1]
The above paragraph, from Pi Daojian’s forward for Zeng Fanzhi’s first solo exhibition in 1990, sketches in the background of this future graduate of the Hubei Academy of Fine Arts’ Oil Painting Department. In that same year in Wuhan, Shu Qun, a major artist from the ’85 period, rejected ‘absolute principles’ (juedui yuanze) and began the random painting of numerical signs; Ren Jian felt his chaotic ‘early oriental imagery’ to be disorganized and embarked on his ‘scanning technique’, in order to dispel the pervading unconsciousness; it was also the year when Wang Guangyi arrived in Wuhan from Zhuhai, and for reasons that were not obvious, came up with small ‘highly flammable’ installations as a result of his experimentation, and due to his innate emotional ties to classical art, began to paint over classical masterpieces, extending his previous symbolic language to these works; Wei Guangqing from the Wuhan Art Academy, Zeng Fanzhi’s teacher, toyed in that year with various objects and named several small unsettling installations his Yellow Books (Huangpishu). All these experiments and records of psychological states took place in studios and homes and had little direct bearing on society. Without exhibitions, and without opportunities for expression, these contemporary artists, who only several years ago were imbued with a dauntless spirit, now felt the reality of ennui and uneasiness.
Zeng Fanzhi was born in 1964, and was a generation younger than the other artists mentioned above. While still a student at the art academy, he felt different degrees of admiration and awe for all these artists. Like many other artists, Zeng Fanzhi had developed a love of painting at an early age, yet the art world before 1976 was dominated by realist styles. No matter how strong the artistic temperaments or how diverse the viewpoints, realist methods and sanctioned political subjects limited the artists to areas of ‘duplication’ and ‘reproduction’; Zeng Fanzhi did not escape this background. It was not until the 1980s, when Western art entered China following the opening up of the country, that the 20 year old Zeng felt a natural response to the new art language and energy. In 1984 and 1985, Zeng and his friends went to the exhibitions of Edvard Munch, Zao Wuki and Rauschenberg respectively; he was shocked by the experience, since the expressionist and abstract paintings, as well as the installations, that he saw were a far cry from the artistic forms and thought promoted by the government. Looking at the artists around him, he discovered that the number continuing along the worn path of realism was rapidly decreasing. In November 1986, as Zeng Fanzhi prepared to begin studies at the Hubei Academy of Fine Arts, a group of artists from that province organized the large Hubei Youth Art Festival. This event took place simultaneously in nine different cities, including Wuhan, Huangshi, Shashi, Xiangfan and Shiyan, with 2000 works exhibited at 28 venues. The range of styles of the works, from expressionist and surrealist to abstract, was astonishing. From the related activities, including seminars and video sessions, people in these cities could witness the earliest celebrations of modernism. With help and support from critics, the journal Art Trends (Meishu sichao) was founded in Hubei in 1985. With its clear modernist views, this magazine became one of the most influential publications among artists in the 1980s. Towards the end of that year in December, the group Tribe, Tribe (Buluo, Buluo), composed mainly of young teachers from the Wuhan Art Academy, organized the Tribe, Tribe First Exhibition. The majority of participating artists were from the Hubei Academy of Fine Arts, and defending the philosophy and theory behind this exhibition was the chief editor of Art Trends (Meishu sichao), Peng De. In the following year, when Zeng Fanzhi entered the Hubei Academy of Fine Arts as a student, he must have still felt the lingering glow of the burning modernist spirit.
The influences on the young Zeng Fanzhi came from the West and from the Chinese modernist movement of the 1980s. In language and expression he was compelled to select an expressionist vocabulary that suited his temperament and which could express his feelings, and so he borrowed from German expression. The color and tone of his early work tend to be emotionally cold, and such works predominated at his first solo show. From the titles and content of the works we can see that Zeng applied a type of Western expressionism to his treatment of familiar characters and events. Dusk, Op.1 (Huanghun zhiyi) and Untitled (Wuti), a work sometimes also called Dialogue before Lunch (Wucan qian de duihua), reflected aspects of the artist’s daily life, but The Sufferer (Shounan) and The Artist and the Model (Yishujia yu mote’er) are works which reveal an alarmed reaction to some event. The suffering figure is not Christ but an ordinary man wearing a red shirt who is seated in a chair; the relationship between the artist and the model is brutalized by daubs of red paint, and the ferocious color and the unbridled brush work reveal the artist’s subconscious psychological tendencies. Nevertheless, Zeng Fanzhi’s expression at this time shows an acute interest in modernist language and emotions, inheriting the basic aesthetic of the ’85 movement. He is searching for an effective path leading away from realism and showing freedom of expression.
However, from the perspective of art history, the art scene of 1990 was quite different from the modernist phenomena of the 1980s. The exhibitions organized at the Gallery of the Central Academy of Fine Arts from in mid-May onwards, including Liu Xiaodong’s Oil Painting Exhibition, The World of Female Painters, and The Yu Hong Oil Painting Exhibition, revealed new currents that brought the essentialism of the 1980s to an end. In the paintings of Liu Xiaodong and Yu Hong, the toning down of the expressionist sentiment was readily discernable. Prior to then, the last phase of modernism in Beijing, exemplified by Xia Xiaowan’s Spirit (Youling), had been either romantic or bitterly cynical, like the endless discussions and commentaries on the ‘soul’ (linghun). An atmosphere of helplessness was beginning to emerge in Beijing, China’s political and cultural center, in the face of envisaged future political realities. Artists made it their task to eliminate, as best they could, the open-ended meaning of their subjects, and they instinctively headed towards a rebellion in ‘aspirations’ and ‘goals’. In July 1991, Beijing Youth Daily organized the New Generation Art Exhibition at the China History Museum, and in September, the Zhao Bandi-Li Tianyuan Exhibition opened in the Beijing Tiandi Building. At these two events people could see the diffusion of new trends in art.
Zeng Fanzhi never lived in Beijing, and, because of his unique background, his understanding of reality differs from that of Beijing artists. In the early 1990s Wuhan, was still a grey, old industrial city, where the scars of history gave the place a dilapidated appearance. There people on the streets would never passionately discuss the political news of the day, as they did in Beijing. For an ordinary art academy student, what were the ways to experience life every day? What did he observe in his surroundings?
As a sensitive critic, Li Xianting had at a very early stage paid attention to the special circumstances in this period of Zeng Fanzhi’s background. Zeng told the critic, years afterwards, the circumstances in which he completed his graduation piece:
At that time the place where I lived was very close to a hospital. Every day when I went to the hospital to use their toilets, I would see patients queuing, scenes of people collapsing or people being rushed to emergency. I suddenly felt that this was the emotion I had to portray, and I needed to paint a series with this feeling.I thought about doing a large-scale piece, and made use of all the techniques, skills and observation methods I had previously used in my solo exhibition. I was exceptionally excited during the painting process, and was very satisfied when the work was completed. The next day I wanted to take it to the academy to show the teachers before the paint was dry.[2]
This passage allows us to easily understand why the works of this artist painted in 1991 still use the expressionist style that had appeared earlier. Despite this, Zeng Fanzhi began to change his style and methods. His personality dictated that he rein in his uncontrolled expressionism. On his canvases appear characters with clearly defined faces, lying on hospital beds and frozen sides of pork. At the same time, the aspects of expressionism that approximate abstraction suddenly disappeared, and he presented a new reality in a comprehensible way. The Hospital Triptych (Xiehe sanlianhua) was a product of the artist’s experience, but he did not depict the functions of a hospital that he saw, but extended the implications of the hospital by following his instincts: the psychological and physical pain, the tortures of medical treatment, and the high mortality rate. Reality and memory forced the artist to narrate the stories that he both felt and understood, not only the reality that he could see and touch. This attitude is the result of excessive modernism, and demonstrates that, even when narrating an objective reality, exaggerated detail and emotionless reproduction are unnecessary, because expression itself is the narration that can convey the artist’s attitude and viewpoint. The familiar objects of daily life, such as a piece of pork, stimulate the artist; he associates the color red of freshly slaughtered meat with the essence of the flesh itself, and extends it to a level that relates to all humanity. In this way, physical reality acquired a thick psychological overlay. One scorching summer, Zeng Fanzhi saw a man napping on a cold slab of pork, and he was excited by the scene. He was not fazed by the man’s unusual way of getting cool, but was struck by the way two different lives had been correlated in a unique relationship that created such a dichotomy. The color red was a feature of his previous works and the artist explains how he discovered the color:
I feel that the color of human skin and the color of meat are sometimes very similar, like when pressure is applied to a leg, or unwanted pieces are chopped away from a piece of meat. When placed together and I looked at them, they reminded me of people. I’ve painted meat many times, and deliberately painted meat the same color as human skin. I also try to capture the feeling of meat pressed together when I paint people. This is all for the same reason, which is also why the color in The Hospital Triptych is the color of meat.[3]
Zeng Fanzhi also explains: ‘I got used to this color as I painted. Looking back after more than ten years, I realize I’ve always been using this color.’[4]
In 1992 when Zeng Fanzhi sent The Hospital Triptych, no. 2 to show in the Guangzhou Biennale, the critic Zhu Bin wrote:
The Hospital Triptych portrays a group of heartbroken and spiritless people in a new expressionist style and language appropriate to oil painting. Within the dull looks in the faces one can feel the kindness and sympathy through the brushstrokes. Language and content are both appropriately announced – this is a sign of maturity in art.[5]
All critics could see the talent in Zeng’s vigorous paintings, and the vacant and numb expressions of his subjects elicited a spiritual affinity among the New Generation artist in the north. As a critic remarked after the Guangzhou Biennale:
In this work, with its powerful expressionist tendencies, ‘liberation’ becomes a pretext, and the true meaning of emotional complexity lies in the detachment of the scene and the anxiety of the outsider.[6]
The explicit expressionist style of his brushstrokes was a genuine portrayal of Zeng Fanzhi’s inner personality. During this period, as a fresh graduate entering society, Zeng was candid about his emotional problems and issues. He was concerned with reality, but at the same time it was clear to him that it was necessary to relate his response to reality to his personal emotions and judgment.
In March 1993 Zeng moved to Beijing. Given his keenness for stimulus, he decided to take the risk, gave up his job in an advertising company and started out as an artist on his own in Beijing. He was confident that only in this city where he could see more exhibitions and more artists could he enrich his ever-changing ‘state of mind’. ‘In Wuhan, there was nothing except for books, and he didn’t think books could help improve him.
In 1994, Zeng Fanzhi started to provide ‘masks’ for the characters he portrayed in his paintings. In his full expressionist period, the artist eliminated the real identities of his characters; even the image of the ‘doctor’ was now suspiciously abstract. After arriving in Beijing, the characters that once lay on pork or hospital beds were separated, and fewer figures appeared in his paintings. Perhaps Zeng Fanzhi’s solitude underscored his own living conditions, and so the objects of his objective observation were often the artist himself, as if it were the artist himself and not his figures who wore masks. The great changes involved in leaving a familiar city where he had friends for a vast world that was difficult to master inevitably left Zeng feeling lonely and estranged. In any case, the appearance of the ‘masks’ suggests that Zeng preferred to exercise calm control as he observed his new surroundings, assessed his new friends, and tackled new problems. Yet, if we pay close attention, the faces in his earlier works – with their huge eyes and standardized faces – already possessed the characteristics of masks, even though we can identify the artist Shang Yang, cigarette in hand, in Hospital Triptych no. 3. Zeng Fanzhi must have discovered one day that the characters produced by his brush were overly conceptualized, to the extent that they were ‘masks’ made with flesh. Alerted to the gravity of the problem, the artist simply decided to accentuate the ‘masks’. The artist now used masks which barely covered the faces of his figures, and utilized different costumes to signify the different identities of his characters, because he believed that the people who wear masks play different roles in society. However, all these figures, whether male or female, have hands with enormous bone structure, a feature that had appeared in earlier works in association with the colors of pork and blood. At this time, the artist eliminated the surroundings of the people in most works in his Mask (Mianju) series. He turns our attention towards the solitary character, and to the clothes, demeanor and emotions of the character expressed through the mask. At times tears appear on the masks, and a sense of terror can be sensed in the way the figures hold their huge and unsettling hands.
One might read a lot into his Mask series of works because the masks create extensions of meaning and interpretation. Yet the important characteristics of these works are not merely the symbolic and metaphoric possibilities of the mask. In truth, the artist had exerted control over his earlier irrepressible inner temperament and unhesitatingly confirmed that unbridled behavior and uncontrolled narration were pointless. In his work, Zeng was foregoing the essence of the modernist viewpoint, and affirming a personal, unique perspective on other modes of existence. In such a way he eliminated an unnecessary display of emotions. From 1993 onwards, Cynical Realism and Political Pop became major trends, and they gave rise in turn to variations: artists could select from the rogue approach, political symbolism, historical imagery or the folk spirit, and like chefs, create different ‘dishes’ and styles of contemporary art. Zeng Fanzhi was to some extent influenced by these, but also discovered that ‘control’ dictated that all decisions should express the basic form of the imagery. Clearly, as most critics noted, social problems alerted Zeng Fanzhi to the meaning of ‘masks’, as he remarked after arriving in Beijing:
At first there were few people I could really communicate with, and, given the many levels of emotion that exist between people, there were also too many people with whom I had to interact and meet. When I was in Wuhan I rarely went out to make new friends or socialize, and my friends were the people I’d grown up with. The need to learn to be with strangers in a new environment was stimulating, and while I could not necessarily paint what others felt, I did paint what I felt.[7]
Zeng Fanzhi here discusses his own social experiences, and the ‘masks’ became a way he could avoid making any response.
After the ‘mask’ became a conceptual symbol, the artist extended the range of content of this symbolism. Zeng Fanzhi placed the masks on different characters – a trendy lady, a gentleman or any other social stereotype. In particular, Zeng regularly placed masks on Young Pioneers. One might well ask: Why would Young Pioneers figure among the ranks of the masked?
At some point in time Zeng Fanzhi consciously began to recall his youth. He suddenly felt the need to reminisce about the emotional damage that he had experienced growing up. That was part of a complicated historical complex, a symbol that could not be brushed aside. The red scarf – the symbol of revolution, honor and loyalty – had not changed with the passing of time or any conflict of ideologies. The artist was filled with contradictory and complicated emotions towards this symbol: resentment tempered its allure. In his youth, Zeng had never been an ‘honorable Young Pioneer’, but on the subject of the glory of history, whether or not this glory was illusory, the artist maintained a strangely religious sentiment. This sensibility helped him complete The Last Supper (Zuihou de wancan). This was a ‘last supper’ of the Young Pioneers, with their leader hosting the ‘sacred’ meal. In this work, Zeng integrated a dual historical concept: Western civilization and Chinese social ideology. The horizontal calligraphic inscription added the touch of traditional Chinese materials, and the distant mountains were simple motifs related to nature and history. To interpret the artist’s story behind this work is a difficult thing, because, through appropriation and juxtaposition, Zeng Fanzhi opened up every possibility of narration. In this painting, we can see an interesting interchange between the seriousness of Cynical Realism and the playful characteristics of Political Pop. After that, Zeng would maintain a consistent memory of history. He would regularly place youths from the past in different backgrounds, and while the backgrounds changed with time, these youths would also retain the same countenances and wear the same red scarves. Some of these figures, wearing scarves, expressed the artist’s early emotions and his contemplation of the question of power, and there is a kind of entranced attitude of reverence for the symbolic patrol, troupe and senior leaders of the Young Pioneers.
Despite the frequent appearance of the masks, the artist never stopped experimenting. At times, he would hark back to works by Western artists, and make changes to works that stimulated him. He attempted to reinterpret some Western masterpieces, such as David’s The Death of Marat, painted in 2001. This method was also a form of historical expression in contemporary art. At the same time, the artist technically adjusted those parts of his paintings that could be easily categorized, as for example by using a scraper to reapply parts of completed sections. This was a further assertion of the artist’s psychological control and his refusal to flaunt the effects of loose and uninhibited brushstrokes. Instead, he scraped away these areas in order to increase the complexity of the painting. As he described it:
I use the scraper to make a little difference from past styles, but I also want to eliminate the things that are strongly expressive. I use the scraper to remove the brushstrokes that revealed my excitement, so that the work can maintain a sense of calm and conceal my emotions.[8]
Gradually, the masks were sometimes removed from the faces. Perhaps the artist had decided that the ongoing use of the mask had become tiresome, and so he explored new possibilities in his paintings. This also indicated the artist’s dissatisfaction with having a long-term ‘trademark’ and signaled that he was mentally ready to change. This was part of the process of emotional change. As the artist needed conceptual indicators that suited his current state of mind, so he began his search. He started to dabble randomly, as part of his earlier expressionist approach, and even returned to the liberated style of the past, so that some of his paintings suddenly seemed abstract. Until 2002, he had still not found a new free style, but his control was loosening up, as manifested in the works titled Us (Women). These created a sensation because there had been no hint whether the artist, after removing the mask, would reinstall the form behind the mask. He decided to eliminate those forms, eliminating them or ‘us’, until the forms themselves completely disappear. At first, the artist retained his affection for form and refused to complete erase ‘us.’ He found pleasure in the structured brushstrokes and very possibly believed that this method preserved his understanding of painting and images during his early expressionist period, the view that the soul could not be entirely separated from the flesh.
To a great extent, the Mask series and some related works focused on society or people in society, and this derived from Zeng’s awareness and concern for his surroundings, as well as from his inescapable social meetings and the wish to be part of the central group or trend. Yet, as the influence of his works increased and attracted considerable attention, the artist felt a new form of anxiety. Until this time, Zeng Fanzhi had been influenced by Western art, and the medium of oil painting itself had confirmed the artist’s interest. However, when the artist reassessed his everyday surroundings, he felt that his paintings did not completely suit the requirements of his mental state.
At the same time that he erased form with circular dots of the brush, Zeng Fanzhi also experimented with lines. For some reason a lyrical tone became apparent in his brushstrokes. The artist reapplied lines freely on the heads of his characters, which represented a complete departure from his previously systematic and mechanical destructive method of working. At the same time he also used these lines to create landscapes. In some of the experimental works, there might be no connection between the abstract lines, but in their movement and expansion they succeed in constructing what we call ‘landscapes’. The time between 2003 and 2004 was crucial in the artist’s transformation. Zeng Fanzhi rapidly abandoned his regulated style of expression, in the same way as Yue Minjun attempted to do so. Very possibly, he decided to give up the search for possibilities of transformation in the Western art with which he was familiar, and wanted to find a new style that suited his temperament within traditional Chinese landscape paintings. He made rational experiments on his canvases, and, applying a technique of holding two brushes in the same hand, he freely painted lines on the canvases, clearly returning to his early arbitrary style. Yet, precisely because of the arbitrariness of these lines, the artist entirely abandoned the brutality and roughness of the Western expressionist style, and accepted the gentleness and reticence of his own culture. In terms of composition, the artist still preserved his earlier attitude, which is obvious from the forms deconstructed by the lines. In terms of style, the artist had now found an ample basis for the liberal style of his early period. He borrowed the lines from ancient Chinese painting, but expressed them through the medium of oil. The result was that the artist did not weaken the descriptive purpose of his paintings, because like the ancient Chinese painters, he narrated stories from between the poles of nature and the inner self. He had passed beyond an earlier essentialism and discarded it, a move which forced many painters in the early nineties to conceal ‘the essential nature of painting itself’ (huihuaxing), but he succeeded in preserving the conceptual nature of his work that enabled people to enjoy his work.
In the experimental process, the subjects of his new paintings included both people and landscapes. Zeng Fanzhi quickly began placing people in his landscapes, instinctively believing that people were a part of nature, as the ancient Chinese painters taught. The idea in ancient Chinese painting that a noble feeling should be created that is both transcendental and elevated had not been heard for a long time. The artist now used lines to amend his earlier impressions of ideological and political leaders (Marx, Engel, Lenin, Stalin and Mao), and it was not long before he depicted the figure of the Great Leader in one of his landscapes, Man with a Straw Hat (Dai caomao de ren, 2005). What was different from the early 1990s was that Zeng Fanzhi did not bring to the image any unsettling sense of ridicule. Rather, he acknowledged the importance and value of time itself. However, he insisted on making a personal judgment and on presenting a contemporary viewpoint in his perception of time. Zeng Fanzhi’s aspiration to be an important artist led him to include art icons like Andy Warhol in his grassy landscapes, and we see the American artist pushing his bike through the narrow village lanes of China, probably a path which Zeng himself had once walked along. This painting expressed Zeng Fanzhi’s desire to have met the master in a relaxed and familiar environment.
By using free lines to readjust and alter images, Zeng Fanzhi made a successful evolution in his art, and confidently entered a new period in his career. One can see from Zeng’s experiments with lines in 2004 that the new lines appear like those which students of traditional calligraphy are required to make in their use of the brush. Everyone realizes that the understanding of oil painting materials and colors is different from that of ink, brush and paper, yet, what do we feel when we compare Zeng Fanzhi’s repeatedly painted, scraped and re-applied landscapes with the landscapes of Huang Binhong?
About a thousand years ago, Fan Kuan completed his Xishan Xinglü Tu (Traveler among streams and mountains); people later thought it was nothing more than a realist painting. We know that while Fan Kuan ‘was living in the mountains, he would sit for days on end, and find pleasure in looking around him. Even on cold snowy nights, he would stare at the landscape, in order to contemplate.’[9] This kind of experience is obviously different from the experiences of artists such as Constable or Monet who worked from sketches to complete their works. According to the tradition of Chinese scholars, Fan Kuan and the majority of Chinese artists adopted a meditative attitude towards nature and life. Xuanhe Huapu records, Fan Kuan set up his abode ‘amid the rocks and forests of Taihua mountain in Zhongnan’, in order ‘to view the rare landscapes of misty clouds on hazy moonlit nights’. Yet who could experience what Fan Kuan observed from nature? The result of this tranquil meeting with the spirits was a profound spiritual quality expressed in those mountains and trees. This quality was weakened in the painters after him, for most felt aggrieved and melancholic. In 2004, Zeng Fanzhi repeatedly moved and scraped the colors on his canvases. In the painting titled Welcoming Pine (Yingke song) he used overlapping lines to suggest how the smallest existing atom receives the gift of life after an encounter with the gods. The atmosphere in this work is different from that of his relaxed grassy landscapes. The artist seems to have clearly grasped the ideas of the ancients, and has turns his own perspective from the roadside vegetation to traditional Chinese landscapes. Nevertheless, when this transformation became a stance, the paintings themselves went through essential changes. The use of angular lines in his compositions creates an abstract viewpoint, and the use of different colors of lines repeatedly overlapping each other created a unique image of nature and a landscape that evolved from the ‘pastoral’ to pure ‘nature’. We recall Huang Binhong’s use of the brush to repeatedly rub, dot, and color, and we all know that Huang Binhong wished to restore the ailing body of Chinese traditional painting. Today, what some oil painters wish to achieve might be similar, but perhaps what Zeng Fanzhi truly wants to attain is a harmony with the quality of traditional painting. Zeng Fanzhi respects his own emotions, which to begin were hazy, but he later concealed them under thick layers of reality, until his fingers were able to flex and control the brush with perfect ease. He thus began his emotional understanding of the ‘human soul,’ a term that was rejected by the post-modernists.
Zeng Fanzhi is one of the Chinese artists who are familiar with and understand Western contemporary art. He is able to grasp, from the works of Dubuffet, De Kooning and other new expressionist painters, the charm of the West. Nevertheless, he finally decided to complete his transformation of style by resuming traditional Chinese methods. With the passing the time, Zeng Fanzhi has never stopped summing up his personal response towards social and psychological realities, which is not a negative but an increasingly enriching process. Regardless of the different origins of influences on the soul, those elements that had appeared in Zeng’s very early works would always re-appear in new works. For example, his ‘abstract’ works began with passion, but were later expressed in calm compositions; his ‘expressionist’ works began as a flaunting of emotions, but were later reworked with graceful lines; the early Mask works were intended to conceal, but he later discovered it to be a metaphoric supposition, and he revealed the reality of the ‘mask’ at the same time as he created an aesthetic solution. Finally, the artist discovered, after the theory of reflection on his early years, that the culture he was familiar with was part of life itself.
Form the late 1990s onwards new paintings appeared in different forms and styles. Compared with the early works, the most obvious difference is that the new paintings are the product of post-modernist influences. In a more expanded conceptual domain, Zeng had regained the freedom to paint and was no longer troubled by the medium itself, because the validity of the medium can be found in the basis of the post-modern approach. Zeng Fanzhi reclaimed the right to vitality, influence, pleasure, the essence of painting and even literary sophistication. The result is that he and other painters have rebuilt the esteemed position of painting. In this process of reconstruction, the story of Zeng Fanzhi’s ‘state of mind’ acts as a connecting link, and its importance speaks for itself.
18 August 2006
Notes:
[1] Pi Daojian, ‘Precocious Simplicity’ (Zaoshu de danchun), Jiangsu Art Monthly (Jiangsu huakan), no. 1, 1991.
[2] ‘A Restless Soul: Dialogue between Li Xianting and Zeng Fanzhi’ (Yongbu’anning de linghun: Li Xianting he Zeng Fanzhi duitan lu), I/We (Wo, women), 2003.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ideality and Practice (Lixiang yu caozuo), Sichuan Fine Arts Publishing House 1992, p.281.
[6] The Documents of the Guangzhou Biennale: Oil Painting of the Nineties (Zhongguo Guangzhou shoujie jiushiniandai shuangnian huazhan youhua bufen zuopin wenxian), Sichuan Fine Arts Publishing House, 1992, p.58.
[7] ‘A restless soul: Dialogue between Li Xianting and Zeng Fanzhi’ (Yongbu’anning de linghun: Li Xianting he Zeng Fanzhi duitan lu), I/We (Wo, women), 2003.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Liu Daochun, Shengchao minghua ping (Comments on paintings of the dynastic reigns).
Translated by Dr. Bruce Gordon Doar