Year: 2017
Material/Technique: Ink and acrylic on Xuan paper
Dimensions: 198 x 213 cm
Layering ink of various consistencies onto Xuan paper, Zheng creates a variety of forms with his dexterous brushwork. “My intention,” says Zheng, “is to investigate the logic of the ink medium and its perceptual characteristics, the alternation between transcendence and the materiality of the work.” Through the interactions of ink, acrylic, water, and paper, Zheng’s paintings generate and record the processes that underlie the emergence of order (including organic life and human consciousness) and its inevitable dissipation. His paintings thus resemble natural structures ranging from neurons, blood vessels, and tree branches to mountains, rivers, and coastlines, but by instantiating their formation rather than by objective depiction.
The Artist
Zheng Chongbin (Shanghai 1961-) was educated as a classical Chinese figurative painter at the elite China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, where he taught for four years after graduation in 1984. Acclaimed as one of China’s preeminent young experimental ink painters in the 1980's, he mounted his first solo exhibition at the Shanghai Museum of Art in 1988. In 1989, he received a fellowship from the San Francisco Art Institute to study installation, performance, and conceptual art, receiving his MFA in 1991. A resident of the San Francisco Bay Area for over three decades, Zheng is inspired by the region's distinctive atmospheric and environmental effects and rich ecologies, as well as by the California light and space movement.
Throughout his career of three decades, Zheng Chongbin has held the classical Chinese ink tradition and Western pictorial abstraction in productive mutual tension.
Zheng’s work can be found in the collections, among others, of the British Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Orange County Museum of Art in California, M+ in Hong Kong, the Daimler Art Collection in Stuttgart, Germany, the DSL Collection in France, and the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore.