Renowned Chinese artist recreates Van Gogh self-portraits to stunning effect

Editor’s Note: Philip Tinari is the director of the Ullens Center of Contemporary Art in Beijing. He is also the co-curator of “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World,” now on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Zeng Fanzhi is perhaps one of China’s best-known painters. He is also one of its savvy interlocutors and most knowledgeable connoisseurs.

Now, Zeng is offering a unique twist on one of the art world’s most recognizable figures by recreating Van Gogh’s self-portraits in a series of striking new paintings.

The collection of six canvases – three of which are going on display for the first time at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum – see Zeng adding his own signature swirls and expressionist brushstrokes to the Dutch painter’s familiar face.

The exhibition “Zeng Fanzhi | Van Gogh,” pays a special tribute to the revolutionary artist whose museum he now inhabits. Van Gogh’s square format remains, though Zeng updates it with ready-for-Instagram videos showing the paintings taking shape.

It is widely known that Van Gogh drew inspiration from the Japanese art of his time (he used the term “Japonaiserie” in his letters). Now, more than a century later, Zeng returns the favor as the first living Asian artist to show alongside the Van Gogh Museum’s holdings.

A post-Mao painter

Interestingly, the exhibition opens in the same week as the 19th Party Congress in Beijing, where the country’s leadership is expected to convey China’s expanded role in the world.

For Zeng, as for many artists who came of age in the early post-Mao years, the great figures of the Western tradition loom as inspiration. They help him to consider the ways in which art can encourage individual vision, formal experimentation and social commentary.

One of China's most prominent contemporary artists, Zeng Fanzhi, has recreated Van Gogh's self-portraits in a series of striking new paintings.

The collection of six canvases -- three of which are going on display for the first time at Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum.

The paintings offer a unique twist on one of the art world's most recognizable figures.

Inspired by the dozens of self-portraits produced by the Dutch artist in his lifetime, Zeng began by recreating an image of Van Gogh's face.

He then added his own signature swirls and brushstrokes transforming the 19th century painter's masterful post-impressionism into a work of contemporary art.

A self-professed Van Gogh fan, Beijing-based Zeng has long explored self-portraits in his artwork.

"With each major change in my life I always feel a strong craving to paint a self-portrait," he said in a press statement. "All these self-portraits have now become a kind of documentary of my life."

"I try to re-experience Van Gogh's self-image when I paint his face on the canvas. As the process progresses I get the feeling that I'm getting to know this stranger better and better," says Zeng.

This is not the first time that Zeng, one of China's most commercially successful artists, has re-imagined classic images in his own distinct style.

In 2001 he famously recreated Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper."

He replaced Jesus and his disciples with young communists sporting red neckties.

The painting sold for $23.3 million in 2013, setting a new record for a piece of Asian contemporary art.

Opening tomorrow, the new exhibition "Zeng Fanzhi | Van Gogh" will also feature two other paintings by Zeng, one of which was directly influenced by Van Gogh's famous work "Wheatfield with Crows."

Renowned Chinese artist recreates Van Gogh self-portraits to stunning effect

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In recent years, Zeng has surrounded himself with some of China’s most innovative and influential entrepreneurs, like Jack Ma, Pony Ma, and Thomas Shao. He offers them a sense of transcendence and inspires people to connect the day-to-day bustle of China’s economic growth with the larger truths of history, beauty and thought.

If Zeng feels the internal anxieties that plagued Van Gogh, he doesn’t show it. But if we were to choose paintings that stand in for this particular time and place – China at the dawn of yet another new era – we might do worse than to look to his. They are at once grounded and frenetic, classical and subversive, monumental and ethereal.

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Zeng Fanzhi: The master of reinvention

02:51 - Source: CNN

A visit to Zeng’s studio in Caochangdi, a neighborhood in Beijing’s northeastern outskirts, is an experience of quick transcendence. Greeted by an ancient wooden bodhisattva, guests are offered hot drinks and ushered into a room of the grand, blocky proportions found throughout the capital’s art districts since the mid-2000s. Strains of Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky lilt through the air.

Unlike the industrial feel of many Beijing studios, Zeng’s workshop serves as both an active space for producing massive oil paintings and intricate pencil drawings, and as a reflective place for reading, conversation, cigar smoking and even afternoon naps. It is littered with books – mainly on the masters of Western painting from the renaissance onward. It is also impeccably appointed, though he would not want us to dwell on the specifics of the furniture or porcelain.

A painting prodigy

Zeng belongs to a generation that sits on a cusp in Chinese history. Born in 1964, he remembers the Cultural Revolution and the feeling of social control from his childhood. But he was too young to participate fully in the artistic awakening of China’s rollicking 1980s.

Zeng spent that decade at home in the capital of Hubei province, Wuhan, where the city’s art academy accepted eight students to its oil painting department every four years. Having missed his chance the first time around, Zeng spent his early twenties working in a printing press and waiting for another turn.

This diligence, when he did finally enter the Hubei Fine Arts Academy, became legendary: When not painting late into the night, Zeng would absorb what information he could from the school’s limited library. He remembers an encyclopedia of Western art history, published by the Japanese newspaper company Asahi Shimbun, from which he first learned about figures such as Beckmann, Ernst and Schiele.

"Mask Series 1996 No. 6" (1996) by Zeng Fanzhi —

Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi made global headlines in 2013 when one of his works, "The Last Supper" (2001), sold at a Sotheby's auction for $23.3 million. However, the prolific artist has been producing works of art for many years as his newly-opened retrospective -- "Zeng Fanzhi: Parcours", presented by the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing -- shows.

"Idealism" (Mask Series 2003 No.1) by Zeng Fanzhi —

Although best known for his "Mask" series of paintings, Zeng's work has undergone numerous reinventions over his thirty year career.

"Inner peace" (2013) by Zeng Fanzhi —

Co-curator of the exhibition and director of the UCCA in Beijing, Philip Tinari, says despite the eye-popping prices Zeng's works attract, they wanted the exhibition to focus on art, not money. "One thing we are trying to accomplish with this show is to give a sense of this artist beyond the discussion around the market for his works," he says.

"A Man in Melancholy" (1990) by Zeng Fanzhi —

Zeng studied art at the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts in China in the late 1980s and began a career in advertising after he graduated. He quit his job and moved to Beijing to become a full-time artist in 1993 after some of his early works were purchased by an influential art collector.

Mask Series No.11 (1996) by Zeng Fanzhi —

A year after he arrived in Beijing, Zeng started to produce his iconic "Mask" series, paintings that reflect the alienation he felt while settling into the city's newly-rich, rapidly changing society. Zeng has said that he believed people in the Chinese capital hid their true identities from each other and themselves.

"Hospital Triptych No.2" (1992) by Zeng Fanzhi —

The exhibition "includes about 60 works," says Tinari. "The earliest comes from 1990 and the most recent were just completed last month, in the studio, and together they give us a sense of an artist and how his career has progressed."

"Parcours" (1990) by Zeng Fanzhi —

"He's very unique among Chinese artists in that he didn't get attached to a specific motif, or even style, and he's kind of continually reinvented himself over these years," Tinari says.

"Meat" (1992) by Zeng Fanzhi —

This painting is from the artist's "Meat" series. These paintings are among some of his earliest works and were inspired by the outdoor butcheries that surrounded his then-home.

"Portrait" (2004) by Zeng Fanzhi —

"Putting together a show like this is always an extended exercise in persuasion because you have to convince collectors and institutions to temporarily part with objects that are very dear to them," says Tinari.

"Lucian Freud" (2015) by Zeng Fanzhi —

"Together the show is a portrait of him as an artist, but we see in these portraits his relationships with people he knows, his dealer and some of his collectors, his friends, himself, but also with figures from art history, with whom he feels a special connection -- so specifically people like Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon," Tinari says.

"Lucian Freud" (2011) by Zeng Fanzhi —

"I think at the end of the day it's really about a person trying to make sense of his own position in relation to society but also to the history of that society, and to this number of long and kind of grand traditions of cultural output," Tinari adds of Zeng's introspective approach to his art.

"Old Brother" (2004) by Zeng Fanzhi —

"The idea of the artist reinventing himself, finding a new footing, a new language, a new set of questions, is what keeps the work urgent, relevant and connected to its historical moment," Tinari explains.

"Blue" (2015) by Zeng Fanzhi —

More recently, Zeng has started to paint landscapes that incorporate visual forms drawn from traditional Chinese culture, especially classical gardens.

"The Hare" (2012) by Zeng Fanzhi —

"Now interestingly, in the most recent works, he's kind of turned away from that entirely and doubled down on the long and grand tradition of Chinese painting," Tinari says.

"Laoco?n" (2015) by Zeng Fanzhi —

"Zeng Fanzhi: Parcours" is showing at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, China from September 19 to November 19, 2016.

Zeng Fanzhi: Parcours

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Zeng’s earliest works boldly explored internal psychological terrain, attracting the attention of local critics and curators in the rocky years following the Tiananmen protests of 1989. For his graduation project, he rejected the norm of painting peasants or shepherds on China’s rural periphery, and instead created a triptych inspired by a hospital across the street from his student apartment. Arranged into compositions that channeled Western religious paintings, the works oozed with the nervous tension of a painterly prodigy finding his place in a turbulent society.

Within months, Zeng had sold his first painting (to the dealer Johnson Chang). He was then included in the January 1993 exhibition “China’s New Art: Post-1989,” which Chang organized in Hong Kong to bring international attention to the artistic outpouring that had taken place since Tiananmen. Zeng then moved to Beijing, entering the capital’s vibrant art scene and quickly realizing the affectations and pretenses that underlay success within it (his best-known works – the “Mask Series” – date back to this moment of jaded discovery).

Constantly evolving

Zeng’s style has continuously evolved in the quarter-century he has spent in Beijing. And crucially, unlike many of his contemporaries, when he shifts gears, he does so for good.

Last year, I had the privilege of curating Zeng’s largest retrospective to date, a sweeping survey of his career’s output at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. For the occasion, Zeng’s longtime friend and sparring partner, the renowned Japanese architect Tadao Ando, designed a concept for our space. Through inserting a series of freestanding walls, he transformed the converted factory into into rigidly structured “parcours” (also the exhibition’s title) that took visitors through Zeng’s life and work.

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Inside Zeng Fanzhi's stunning new show

02:20 - Source: CNN

The exhibition featured a 13-by-13-foot painting – featuring his signature brushwork and palette – that revolved around elements from Renaissance masters such as Dürer and Da Vinci. Beside it, one of a series of eight openings through which Zeng’s 2009 self-portrait remained visible at the far end of the space.

Through curating the exhibition, I learned a great deal about Zeng and, most importantly, the level of detail that goes into his creative process. Zeng meticulously records this process by filming his every stroke. When paintings are as layered as his, each canvas contains hundreds of iterations that are altered and buried as the act of painting unfolds.

“Zeng Fanzhi | Van Gogh” is on at The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam from October 20, 2017 to February 25, 2018.