Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to announce the first United States solo exhibition of paintings by Chinese artist Zeng Hao. Hao’s paintings belong to the generation of New Realist painters that have come to define the Chinese Avant Garde. Hao’s depictions of people and their domestic possessions set against disconnected grounds comment pointedly on psychological alienation within a framework of enormous economic expansion.
“Zeng Hao is not a ‘problem’ painter in the strict sense. Compared with Zhang Xiaogang, his works contain very little of the kind of heavy sense of history or effective methods of cultural narration; compared with Shi Chong, his work lacks an obvious exposition of painterly question or any sense of extremism in terms of technique. And yet in his works, there emerges a unique air of introspection and other psychological factors that aptly express the new spiritual reality of the era that follows the cynicism
and nihilism of the early 1990s. The contradictory narrative structures and semiotic methods in his works are likewise incredibly well-suited to our moment, in which determinacy has been lost. For precisely these reasons, I have always considered Zeng Hao emblematic of the Chinese conceptual painting movement in the mid -1990s.” —Huang Zhuan translated by Philip Tinari
About the Artist
Zeng Hao (b. 1963) has had numerous solo exhibitions including Centre d’Art Contemporain, Meymac, France. He has been included in numerous group exhibitions including the Sao Paulo Biennial (2002), The First Triennial of Chinese Arts, Guangzhou Museum of Art, China (2002), Prague Biennial2 (2005), “Always to the Front—China Contemporary Art” Kuandu Museum of Fine Art, Taiwan (2005), and Chinese Contemporary Art, Arario Gallery, Korea (2006). Zeng Hao lives and works in Beijing.