Portrait

There are few Chinese painters whose careers boast the breadth and complexity as that of Zeng Fanzhi. From the earliest stages of his career, Zeng's paintings have been marked by their emotional directness, the artist's intuitive psychological sense, and his carefully calibrated expressionistic technique. His earliest Hospital and Meat series, painted in the early 1990s, displayed his inherent humanism and sympathy with the daily existence of those around him. Moving to the more cosmopolitan Beijing in the early 1990s, Zeng's art displayed an immediate shift, responding to his immersion into a more superficial environment, his seminal Mask series displaying the tensions between the artist's dominant existential concerns and an ironic treatment over the pomposity and posturing inherent to his new contemporary urban life.
His stylization of emotion becomes more pronounced as Zeng's works evolved into his so-called "behind the Mask" paintings of the early 2000s. Painted in 2005, Zeng Fanzhi's Portrait (Lot 130) is an exceptional example of this series, and reveals a fastidiously dressed cosmopolitan standing solemnly in the center of canvas, with gray washes running laterally off the figure. The yellow suit, a wider allegory for the "mask" reflects the attitude that urbanites have adopted to impress and protect. Zeng's representation of raw, awkwardly over-sized hands, the unfinished trousers and the haloing black washes above the figure's head play against the superficially composed appearances of his subjects, and ironic treatment of emotional performance as a metaphor for a lost self, of stunted self-realization. He is resolutely alone and isolated; his fixed gaze at odds with the cool, restrained and ethereal canvas that almost prevents him from fully realizing his own material existence.
'The image of the mask is a theme I have worked on for several yearsK [these paintings] focus on life in the modern environment and, due to distrust, jealousy and misunderstandings between people, a state of mind that is unavoidably forced upon them. In today's society, masks can be found in every place. It doesn't matter if you are protecting yourself, or you desire to deceive others, the true self will always be concealed.' (Zeng Fanzhi cited in Pi Li, Zeng Fanzhi 1993-1998, Beijing, 1998, p. 84).
The present Mask series, painted in 1999 (Lot 131) is the quintessential archetype of Zeng Fanzhi's most iconic subject. From the celebrated series that stretched from 1994 to 2000, the present lot is an exceptional example that exemplifies Zeng's piercing insight into the conflicted feelings of his generation - a generation that witnessed China's phenomenal transformation from Communism to the new conditions of a capitalist-consumerist environment.
Mask Series is one of the most striking images from the series, a concise statement signaling the materialist trappings of class aspirations and the associated strain on individual psyches. In Mask Series, the artist presents a lone figure against a nebulous and muted background. Dressed in a sharp, elegant black sit and white tie ensemble, the figure confronts the viewer directly. The facial features of the mask are sharp and exaggerated, and despite his direct orientation towards the viewer, he appears at pains to seem emotionally remote and aloof. The impenetrable expression and the man's hollow gaze are tainted with artifice, contrivance and fashionable affectation.
The creation of the Mask series insulated Zeng and allowed him to identify the kind of 'face' one was expected to show in polite society. The less desirable aspects of one's character could be concealed; one could become - or more accurately, one could present - a new person under the use of a civilized mask. The strong juxtaposition of contrasting elements creates the greatest impact of the Mask series; the tailored bourgeois suits and fitted masks coupled with the exaggerated flesh tones pulsating with wrought veins create a paradoxical image.
As Zeng exemplified, "Human beings all tend to show the best of themselves, such as the affected poses before a camera, the simulated posture of a complacent citified person." As such, Mask Series is not portrait in the traditional sense - his protagonist rather stands as a symbol of China's new social order, one that is corrupted by superficiality and false surfaces. Zeng questions the gap between public and private truth and the honesty of expression in modern Chinese society, and exposes the complicated psychology felt by those compelled into new social roles experienced by a nation on the brink of a major transformation.