Hello, Lu Peng!
First of all, I would like to thank you for inviting me to this Sanya gathering. It was a wonderful gathering. We had the chance to discuss and recall people and events in 1985, in which I learned and understood a lot. Of course, I agree that you bring our co-works to auction to support AAA and your work! Thanks again! Zeng Fanzhi July 3'd, 2007.
Work in brush and ink on xuan paper (70x140)
“To a great extent, the Mask series and some related works focused on society or people in society, and this derived from Zeng's awareness and concern for his surroundings, as well as from his inescapable social meetings and the wish to be part of the central group or trend. Yet, as the influence of his works increased and attracted considerable attention, the artist felt a new form of anxiety. Until this time, Zeng Fanzhi had been influenced by Western art, and the medium of oil painting itself had confirmed the artist's interest. However, when the artist reassessed his everyday surroundings, he felt that his paintings did not completely suit the requirements of his mental state.
At the same time that he erased form with circular dots of the brush, Zeng Fanzhi also experimented with lines. For some reason a lyrical tone became apparent in his brushstrokes. The artist reapplied lines freely on the heads of his characters, which represented a complete departure from his previously systematic and mechanical destructive method of working. At the same time he also used these lines to create landscapes. In some of the experimental works, there might be no connection between the abstract lines, but in their movement and expansion they succeed in constructing what we call 'landscapes'. The time between 2003 and 2004 was crucial in the artist's transformation. Zeng Fanzhi rapidly abandoned his regulated style of expression, in the same way as Yue Minjun attempted to do so. Very possibly, he decided to give up the search for possibilities of transformation in the Western art with which he was familiar, and wanted to find a new style that suited his temperament within traditional Chinese landscape paintings. He made rational experiments on his canvases, and, applying a technique of holding two brushes in the same hand, he freely painted lines on the canvases, clearly returning to his early arbitrary style. Yet, precisely because of the arbitrariness of these lines, the artist entirely abandoned the brutality and roughness of the Western expressionist style, and accepted the gentleness and reticence of his own culture. In terms of composition, the artist still preserved his earlier attitude, which is obvious from the forms deconstructed by the lines. In terms' of style, the artist had now found an ample basis for the liberal style of his early period. He borrowed the lines from ancient Chinese painting, but expressed them through the medium of oil. The result was that the artist did not weaken the descriptive purpose of his paintings, because like the ancient Chinese painters, he narrated stories from between the poles of nature and the inner self. He had passed beyond an earlier essentialism and discarded it, a move which forced many painters in the early nineties to conceal 'the essential nature of painting itself' (huihuaxing), but he succeeded in preserving the conceptual nature of his work that enabled people to enjoy his work.”
Artists in Art History. Lü Peng.