Zeng Fanzhi’s Suzhou Exhibition April 10 – June 7, 2009 is the first art project of the ArtMia Foundation. Mutually inspired efforts between traditional culture and contemporary art imply ArtMia’s consistent appeals.

Suzhou is a city highly-acclaimed for the art of traditional gardens and it has a beautiful museum designed by Bei Yuming. Zeng Fanzhi is the very first Contemporary oil painter to have a solo show in this museum which display a number of abstract landscape paintings. In several aspects, the Taihu Lake Stone is posing a challenge to the artists’ traditional conceptions about the physical world. Besides, in Zeng Fanzhi’s paintings, the ‘concrete’ Tai Lake Stone is nothing but the outcome of a fleeting inspiration, instantly becoming blurred but extraordinarily vivid. Only rough shapes and average features of garden stones are possessed in each piece of his paintings entitled ‘Taihu Lake Stone’, representing the soul of the past memories about gardens.

The Chinese title of this exhibition “With Whom Shall I Sit” derives from one tourist spot in the Humble Administrator’s Garden, namely the “With Whom Shall I Sit Pavilion”, whose name was given inspired by Su Shi’s poem Rouged Lips: Reclining in a Chair Leisurely: it reads “Reclining in a chair leisurely, I see thousands of mountains outside Mr. Yu’s house. With whom shall I sit? Nothing but a bright moon and refreshing breeze”. Suzhou is a city marvelous enough to refine the heat of art in its furnace into another refined and introspective visage. Artists today are confronted with unprecedented vicissitude of social and natural environment, before which however noisy clamor will be turned into delicate silence.