Evolving from his iconic Mask series, in 2003 Zeng Fanzhi began work on a series of portraits depicting celebrities, fellow artists, and political leaders. Departing from the blank, staring visors of the previous series, in these works Zeng instead obscures the features of his recognizable subjects through rash, haphazard, and overlapping brushstrokes. Using up to four brushes of varying size simultaneously, the artist creates a knotted nest of writhing lines, teeming across the canvas and refracting the form of the portrait beneath. “When I paint with two brushes in one hand,” explains Zeng of his unorthodox technique, “I hope the second brush could constantly destroy the lines created by the first brush…one brush to create and another one to destroy. The resultant lines in the painting are extremely complex and embody many unexpected chances and coincidences.” With this process of continual construction and destruction, Zeng emphasizes the true inscrutability of superficially well-known celebrity figures. Perhaps the epitome of this veiled notoriety, Zeng has aptly chosen Pop Art icon Andy Warhol for several iterations of obfuscated representations, including the eponymous Warhol. As an artistic celebrity personality who once claimed “I am a deeply superficial person,” Warhol exemplifies the unreality of a public persona, an ideal subject for Zeng’s expression of the opacity that shields an individual’s true emotions. Distorted beneath a twisted mass of seething, frenzied strokes, in Warhol the instantly identifiable face is rendered abstruse, emphasizing at once the spurious fallacy of celebrity and the concealment of personality which accompanies it.

Whether shrouded by a literal mask, or by a more figurative screen of distorting paint, Zeng’s paintings address the anguish of secret personal identity. Embroiled with the emotional scarring of isolation and anxiety, Zeng’s works provide a crucial commentary on an oft-overlooked aspect of current societal distress. Zeng claims, “My paintings usually have a side that’s rather sad, conflicted, worried, and fragile…there’s a power of tragedy within. I don’t particularly like to paint cheerful scenes because those seem too superficial. I prefer to paint deeper and more internal scenes that can touch people.” This ability of the artist to evoke buried emotional concerns has elevated Zeng Fanzhi to his current stature as an icon of Contemporary Chinese art.