Chinese political history meets Pop Art and surrealism in a major retrospective of Zeng Fanzhi’s work now on view at Paris’s Musée d’Art Moderne. Coming of age under the shadow of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, Zeng places his personal narrative against the backdrop of China’s fragile relationship with its growing artist community and the influx of Western ideologies. At the exhibition, 40 of Zeng’s paintings and sculptures are arranged in reverse chronological order, ending with the artist’s earliest works created while he was still living in his home city of Wuhan in 1990.
The specter of China’s political instability is everywhere in Zeng’s work—in Tian’An Men, Mao’s abstracted face almost completely obscures Tiananmen Square, the site of the 1989 student protests; in Mask Series No. 6, Chinese students, all sporting the ubiquitous red scarf, wear grotesque masks with absurdly large smiles. But Zeng also draws much of his imagery from the history of Chinese decorative arts, with his landscapes and portraits taking on a fantastical sensibility.
Through February 16, 2014, at Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; mam.paris.fr
