Zeng Fanzhi 曾梵志

Why this artist matters now

Born in 1964 in Wuhan, China, Zeng Fanzhi developed his passion for painting at an early age. In the 1970s, artists were limited to painting politically sanctioned subjects in socialist realist styles. It was not until the 1980s, following the gradual opening up of the country, that Western art entered China, and Zeng was struck by the abstract and expressive works that he saw. In his third year as a student in the oil painting department at the Hubei Academy of Fine Arts, Zeng put aside socialist realism and be- gan working in a painterly vocabulary particularly influenced by Max Beckmann and other German expressionists. For his graduation piece from the Hubei Academy of Fine Arts in 1991, Zeng completed his Hospital Triptych No. 1, the first of his hospital paintings. In these paintings, Zeng portrayed the trauma and anguish of sickness and death in his images of tense hospital waiting rooms and doctor-patient encounters. Zeng was inspired to make this series because he visited the

Source: Artsy · Trust score: 85% · Updated 1mo ago