Zeng Jianyong’s paintings—an allegorical vision.

From “Brigade Leader” and “Neckerchief” to the “Roles” series, Zeng Jianyong has conceived a comprehensive childhood world. It is a world filled with variegated colors but also with raw fear, like a glass eyeball portending an unstable existence. Critics regularly adopt an iconic orientation to explain the historical narrative in Zeng Jianyong’s works, with an eye to their semantic contemporaneity. Indeed, a sensitive response to semiotic, symbolic visual codes and to the iconography of contemporary Chinese art has been a consistent strand in Zeng Jianyong’s creative work for a considerable period. In the current exhibition’s new works, we find that the artist is attempting a readjustment of pictorial structure, allowing more animated forms to grow spontaneously. What is more, an intensification of dreamlike flavor imbues the pieces with abundant resonances.

An artist needs to view, perceive and digest events in order to express their immediate sense of being alive. Though Zeng Jianyong does not believe these pieces are connected with specific personal experiences and memories, and although in theory they seem to exemplify a de-emphasis of the subjective, yet precisely herein lies the intriguing issue they pose for the study of art history.
Curator: Wei Xiangqi