ZENG FANZHI (B. 1964)

Zeng Fanzhi is one of China's most highly regarded and versatile expressionistic painters. His earliest works focused on images of exaggerated figures in hospitals or butcher shops. Zeng established himself as a painter with his famous "Mask" series, in which his images of groups or individuals whose anxieties and conflicting emotions are hidden beneath the veneer of a cool white and inscrutable mask. Alienation and a trembling anxiety are ever-present concerns, and the artist returns again and again to basic existential fears and the nature of identity itself.