Boers-Li Gallery is pleased to announce, Zeng Hong- Solo exhibition, and the first show of 2012 in Gallery 2, promoting young artists.  The opening reception begins at 4pm, February 16th, 2012. The exhibition, featuring more than ten paintings by the artist, will run until March 11.

Zeng Hong's work centers on the particular political and industrial processes of China.  Beginning in the 1960's, as Sino-Soviet relations broke down in the socialist camp and the pressure of the Cold War mounted, China began to transfer its military industry to the mountains in the southwest.  Among this industrialized ideological landscape were millions of intellectuals from the north and east, serving the ideals of their country and relocating from the city to the mountains, with a great number of them spending their entire lives there in service to the next generation. With the Reform and Opening Up, and the close of the Cold War, these remote enterprises were termed the “Third Front Construction,” born in the 1970’s; Zeng Hong grew up here as the second generation. 

Although Zeng Hong left those remote places long ago, surviving a childhood in such a secluded and semi-military environment generated his unique expression. Zeng Hong’s work employs motifs of cheap red brick building facades, and repeated ceramic tiles of beauty-less copied and cheap décor, like in the public toilets’ "public private space". These repeated motifs correspond with the artist’s seemingly mechanical drawing technique to explore concepts both visual and psychological rendering tensions between creativity and duplicity, vitality and imprisonment, even abundance and monotony. These works move beyond society’s original historical background, presenting a metaphor for modern city life, constructed upon the rhythms of commercial exchange.

Zeng Hong was born in 1974 in Ziyang, Sichuan Province and graduated from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 2004.  He lives and works in Bejing and Chongqing.