Zeng Fanzhi - Untitled 10-6-1 2010
Untitled 10-6-1 2010
180x280cm oil/canvas
Sold for: USD 1.54 million
Auction house: Christie's, Hong Kong
Sale date: 24 November 2013
Seller: Private Collection
Buyer: Anonymous buyer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Zeng Fanzhi (Chinese: 曾梵志; born 1964 in Wuhan, Hubei) is a contemporary Chinese artist based in Beijing. From the earliest stages of his career, Zeng Fanzhi's paintings have been marked by their emotional directness, the artist's intuitive psychological sense, and his carefully calibrated expressionistic technique. Moving to Beijing in the early 1990s, Zeng's art displayed an immediate shift, responding to his immersion in a more superficial environment, his seminal Mask series displaying the tensions between the artist's dominant existential concerns and an ironic treatment of the pomposity and posturing inherent to his new contemporary urban life. Throughout, Zeng's expressionistic techniques run counter to such techniques' conventional usage. That is, Zeng's representation of raw, exposed flesh or awkwardly oversized hands is not an attempt at pure emotional expression, but instead play against the superficially composed appearances of his subjects, an ironic treatment of emotional performance as a metaphor for a lost self, of stunted self-realization.