BIOGRAPHY

Born in Shanghai, lives and works in San Francisco Bay Area.

Throughout his career of three decades, Zheng Chongbin (b. 1961, Shanghai) 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 ranging from neurons, blood vessels, and tree branches to mountains, rivers, and coastlines, but by instantiating their formation rather than by objective depiction.

Maintaining his work with painting, Zheng Chongbin synergistically has integrated his multi- media based exploration throughout his installation and video projects.

His landmark light-and-space installation Wall of Skies (2015) consists of a complex folded structure fully enclosed by a tilted ceiling and slanted walls, creating a delicate interplay of nonparallel lines and planes. Resolving neither into painting, nor sculpture, nor pure light and space, it insists on its material presence even as its objecthood is dissolved in a spatial experience. The latest example includes his major site-specific installation Liquid Space (2019-) in the landmark Zen Temple Ryosoku-in / Kenninji in Kyoto Japan.

In his video installations, Zheng represents processes of nature—from molecular and cellular to topographical and climatic—in the scale of human perception through microscopic and macroscopic imagery and accompanying soundscapes, unfolding these processes spatially and temporally.

Zheng Chongbin was educated as a classical Chinese figurative painter at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, where he taught for four years after graduation in 1984.

Acclaimed as one of China’s preeminent young experimental ink painters in the 1980’s, 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.

A resident of the San Francisco Bay Area for over three decades, Zheng is inspired by the region’s distinctive atmospheric and environmental effects and rich ecologies, as well as by the California light and space movement.

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, Chicago Art Institute, the Orange County Museum of Art in California, M+ in Hong Kong, the Daimler Art Collection in Stuttgart, Germany, the DSL Collection in France, and the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore.

Zheng is the subject of a documentary film, The Enduring Passion of Ink, and an in-depth monograph Zheng Chongbin: Impulse, Matter, Form, edited by Britta Erickson and distributed by D.A.P. in the United States.