Zeng Fanzhi

Zeng Fanzhi (曾梵志) was born in Wuhan, China, in 1964 and graduated from the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts in 1991. He lives and works in Beijing, and over the course of a practice spanning more than three decades he has become one of the most significant painters to emerge from China's post-reform generation, with works held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tate in London, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Zeng's early paintings established the visceral, psychologically charged register that would define his mature work. The Hospital Triptychs of 1991–92 introduced the medical environment as a space of vulnerability and institutional alienation, rendered in an expressionist oil technique that foregrounded the body in extremis. The Meat Series of 1992–93 extended this physicality, transforming butchered flesh into images of raw psychological force. These bodies of work gave way to the Mask Series of 1994–2004, the cycle most closely associated with his international reputation. Executed primarily in oil on canvas, the masked figures of that series address identity, concealment, and social performance in the context of rapid urban change, their exaggerated hands and unsettled postures paradoxically amplifying the emotional unease the masks are meant to suppress. Works from the series are distributed across museum and private collections worldwide. The Last Supper of 2001 extended his engagement with Western art history and religious iconography through the psychological and social vocabulary he had developed during the Mask period.

In subsequent years Zeng moved beyond the Mask idiom toward a broader dialogue with canonical Western subjects and an increasingly expansive painterly investigation. Laocoön, completed in 2015, demonstrates this shift, while works such as Skull-III (2019–23) reflect a later meditation on mortality and the expressive possibilities of reduced symbolic form. More recent canvases — including Lóng Táitóu V (2024) and an Untitled oil on canvas of the same year — show him working at the boundary between landscape and abstraction, layering paint across imagined topographies and spatial structures.

Zeng is represented worldwide by Hauser & Wirth, with co-representation by Gagosian and ShanghART Gallery in Shanghai. His exhibition history spans solo presentations at Gagosian in Hong Kong in 2011 and in New York in 2015, an exhibition at the Louvre in Paris in 2014, and the simultaneous In the Studio exhibitions held at Hauser & Wirth in Hong Kong, London, and Zurich in 2018. Concurrent solo exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth locations in Hong Kong, London, and Los Angeles followed in 2023. A new exhibition of paintings and sculpture at Hauser & Wirth in New York, opening in November 2026, marks his first solo presentation in that city in more than a decade.