Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Ink painting, installation, video, digital media
Website: zhengchongbin.com
Zheng Chongbin was born in 1961 in Shanghai, China. He trained as a classical Chinese figurative painter at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, graduating in 1984 and remaining on its faculty for four years. Acclaimed as one of China’s most innovative young experimental ink painters in the 1980s, he mounted his first solo exhibition at the Shanghai Museum of Art in 1988. In 1989, he received a fellowship from the San Francisco Art Institute to study installation, performance, and conceptual art with David Ireland, Tom Marioni, and Tony Labat, receiving his MFA in 1991. He has lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area ever since, while maintaining active ties to Shanghai and Hong Kong. He is represented by Chambers Fine Art in New York and Beijing, Chambers Fine Art San Francisco, and has exhibited with major galleries and museums across the United States, Europe, and Asia.
His work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, M+ in Hong Kong, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, and many other public and private institutions. He has been an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, the Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany, and held a major commission from the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco for their Osher Gallery. He has also completed a permanent installation at the Zen Temple Ryosoku-in/Kenninji in Kyoto, Japan.
Zheng works across ink and acrylic painting, large-scale light and space installation, video, and digital media, holding the classical Chinese ink tradition and Western pictorial abstraction in productive mutual tension. Systematically exploring and deconstructing the conventions and constituents of both — figure, texture, space, geometry, gesture, materiality — he has developed a distinctive body of work that makes the vitality of matter directly perceptible. Central to his art is the notion of the world as always in flux, consisting of flows of matter and energy that repeatedly cohere and dissipate — a worldview rooted in pre-modern Chinese and especially Daoist thought that enables contemporary inquiries into complex systems like climate and social behavior, artificial intelligence, and quantum physics. In his video installations, Zheng represents processes of nature — from molecular and cellular to topographical and climatic — at human scale through microscopic and macroscopic imagery and soundscapes, unfolding these processes spatially and temporally. His paintings are made with ink and liquid acrylic poured, blown, pressed, and manipulated on polyester film, in a process that is as much performance as composition.
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