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M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong. By donation, © Zeng Fanzhi
Zeng Fanzhi 曾梵志
Mask: Rainbow 面具：彩虹
1997
This oil painting depicts five men beneath a stylised rainbow of pink, yellow, and blue, against a two-tone blue background. Their white masks feature closed eyes and wide grins. Dressed in suits and colourful shirts, the men stand casually, with their arms around each other’s shoulders. This painting is from Zeng Fanzhi’s Mask series, which consists of large-scale portraits of people wearing white masks with unsettling expressions. Zeng’s figures adopt the flashy clothes and exaggerated poses of models photographed for fashion magazines, in a playful, uncanny reworking of the iconography of 1990s consumer culture. While the rainbow and warm postures are clear indications of contentment and positivity, the masks suggest that the scene is staged. The men’s large hands, with prominent veins, imply nervousness and tension.
Zeng developed the series after moving from Wuhan to Beijing in the early 1990s. Shifting from his earlier expressionist portrayals of raw meat and hospitals, the Mask paintings reflect on a pervasive sense of unease that accompanied rapid economic development in Chinese cities. The series marks a turn in Zeng’s artistic language, while retaining elements from early works. A smoother finish replaces gestural brushwork, but there is continuity in terms of his subjects’ oversized hands and exaggerated features.
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