Studio Lecture Series: Zheng Chongbin

Date
Thu April 28th 2022, 5:30 - 7:00pm
Event Sponsor
Department of Art & Art History
Location
McMurtry Building
355 Roth Way, Stanford, CA 94305
Oshman Hall

Stanford Department of Art & Art History's Millicent Greenwell Clapp Studio Lecture Series presents Zheng Chongbin.

Born in Shanghai, Zheng Chongbin lives and works in San Francisco Bay Area. Throughout his career of three decades, Zheng has held the classical Chinese ink tradition and Western pictorial abstraction in productive mutual tension. Systematically exploring and deconstructing their conventions and constituents—figure, texture, space, geometry, gesture, materiality—he has developed a distinctive body of work that makes the vitality of matter directly perceptible. 

Central to Zheng’s art is the notion of the world as always in flux, consisting of flows of matter and energy that repeatedly cohered and dissipated. Inherent in pre-modern Chinese and especially Daoist thought, this worldview enables contemporary inquiries into complex systems like climate and social behavior, artificial intelligence, and quantum physics. Through the interactions of ink, acrylic, water, and paper, Zheng’s paintings generate and record the processes that underlie the emergence of order (including organic life and human consciousness) and its inevitable dissipation. His paintings thus resemble natural structures but by instantiating their formation rather than by objective depiction.

Zheng was educated as a classical Chinese figurative painter at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, where he taught for four years after graduating in 1984. Acclaimed as one of China’s preeminent 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, receiving his MFA in 1991. 

Zheng’s work can be found in the collections, among others, of the British Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, and the Chicago Art Institute. 

Image courtesy of the artist.

Please note this event is open to Stanford affiliates. RSVP required

In response to the ongoing public health situation, this event is open to Stanford affiliates only; Stanford ID required for entry. Please follow Stanford Health Alerts for the latest information on university policies.

Oshman Hall, McMurtry Building, is located at 355 Roth Way, Stanford. 

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