Untitled (Lot 1438) epitomize the venture Zeng took to reform his art after Mask Series. Recapturing the traditional form of portraiture, he describes human faces candidly but with a different, revolutionalized brushwork and style of expression. Such restyling is most prominent in Untitled, which exhibits a liberal style of brushwork akin to the aesthetics of Zen Buddism: the character is outlined by sketchy, abbreviated strokes, which bear the flavor of contouring and biao miao, a line-drawing technique, in traditional Chinese art. Zeng deliberately curtails the corporeal body of his subject, showing only the incomplete, defected segments of human image. The contours of these parts, moreover, are sometimes blurred and obliterated, casting the lower part of the body in silhouette. The character seems to be fading out from screen like a movie image when light dies away. Pigments are broadly spread on the periphery of the painted figure, most obviously on the upper and lower ends, but with a light and sparse stroke that leaves on the canvas a hazy paint of grey, allowing only a fleeting glimpse of the image and, consequently, leaving us to lament over the ephemerality and volatility of human existence. Much like Liang Kai's Drunken Celestial in Splashed ink and Shi Ke's Second Patriarch Meditation in the 12th century, as well as Ni Zan's "careless sketching" in the 14th century, this liberal, uncluttered style of painting showcases the essence of the Chinese free-style art which pursues the spirit and the inherent qualities of a person instead of "physique" and "formal similitude". This, in part, sets Chinese portraits apart from the delicate figuration of their Western counterparts. As the component parts of a human figure are reduced, and their linkage and all the details filtered away, we see more clearly the substance of its mind and the nature of its lives. Just as The Book of Changes said, "great sound is difficult to hear; great phenomenon beyond form" and "in ease and simplicity laid the principles of the world", the Zen Buddhist advocates "independence from words" simply because truth is to be found in minimal expression. As is revealed in Untitled, what the artist contemplates has obviously changed from the realistic depiction of figurative forms to the relevation of individual mentality and disposition. What he explores, besides, is the logic behind an unexpressed, blank and minimal representation that gets directly to the essence of lives, which impact on his artistic style after 2005.