Recent Work by Zeng Shanqing

With his masterful and expressive brushwork, Zeng Shanqing has created over his lifetime a body of work typified by a strong sensitivity to line and form combined with his deeply compassionate view of the world. The present exhibition showcases the best of Zeng's recent work, striking for his dynamic use of line and silhouette, vigorous brushstrokes, and masterful use of Chinese colored ink.

Zeng was born in 1932 in Beijing and showed great promise as a very young artist. He was admitted to the elite Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, from which he graduated in 1950, one year after the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. At the Central Academy, Zeng studied under the great painting master Xu Beihong (1895 – 1953). Zeng's influential teacher believed strongly in the necessity of modernizing China's art education system to include principles of Western academic realism, including life drawing, as a basis for the formal teaching of ink painting and oil painting in China's elite academies.

Zeng shared with his teacher an interest in combining classical Chinese painting methods with Western realism, and the result can be seen in Zeng's deeply humanistic, expressive style of portraying his two favorite themes, horses and figures. His works vary from delicate washes of ink to strong, saturated color, and simultaneously explore the dynamic potential of the brushstroke to produce abstracted compositions of powerful visual and emotional resonance. In this sense, Zeng draws both upon Western realism's awareness of form and the interdependent intellectual and aesthetic sensibilities of the classical Chinese literati painting tradition.

Zeng also largely draws his inspiration from the simple, nomadic life of the Tibetan high plateau. Coming of age during the early years of the Communist Party's coming to power in China, Zeng was part of the ill-fated generation of intellectuals that was to suffer under the depredations of that era. Sent to work in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, he began to develop while in Tibet the pictorial breadth and vitality of color that provide the vehicle for his humanistic sympathies.