Zeng Fanzhi
The Mask series, painted through China's 1990s, and then landscapes built from tangled line.
Zeng Fanzhi was born in Wuhan in 1964, lived through the Cultural Revolution as a child, and trained at the Hubei Academy of Fine Arts. The early Hospital and Meat paintings came directly from what he saw near his student accommodation. Moving to Beijing in 1993 produced the Mask series, which occupied him for a decade: figures in Western suits and red scarves wearing blank white masks, with hands painted deliberately oversized and raw. From about 2004 he abandoned the masks for a very different manner — landscapes and portraits built from dense, scratched, overlapping lines, painted with several brushes held in one hand.
The Mask paintings of 1994 to 2004 lead the market decisively and are the works most frequently faked, so provenance to a documented exhibition or a first-hand purchase carries real weight. The later abstract-landscape works form a substantial second market. Prices are set principally in Hong Kong. Zeng's surfaces are thinly painted with visible scoring and scratching, which is technique rather than damage but is regularly reported as the latter. Works on paper and a small number of print editions exist; sculpture is scarce.
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