ZHENG CHONGBIN 郑重宾 (b. 1961, Shanghai) is well-known for his installations which are “neither painting nor sculpture” as well as his black and white graphic abstract paintings with dramatic strokes and recently, asymmetrical canvases. He lives and works in Shanghai and San Francisco.
Zheng graduated from the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou in 1984 then taught there until 1988. This was when he also had his first solo show at the Shanghai Museum of Art. He received a fellowship from the San Francisco Art Institute where he finished an MFA in 1991 covering installation, performance and conceptual art.
His most famous light and space installation is “Wall of Skies” (2015) shown at Ink Studio Beijing in 2015 and at the 11th Shanghai Biennale in 2016-2017. Another was his first show in Japan, “Liquid Space,” in 2019, a three-dimensional wall sculpture mounted on custom-made honeycomb-shaped aluminium panels. This was particularly special because it reflected Zheng’s passion for Zen and was site-specific to Ryōsokuin, a subtemple of Kenninji, the oldest Zen temple in Kyoto.
“Chimeric Landscape” was an environmental video installation shown at the 2015 Venice Biennale and Art Basel HK in 2017.
M+ has acquired eight of his works starting in the Eighties as a documentation of his career. Two major New York museums acquired his abstract paintings — Unfolding Landscape (2015) by The Metropolitan Museum of Art with and Skylines (2014) by the Brooklyn Museum. The LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) featured Turbulence (2013) in a joint exhibition with Roy Lichtenstein.
His works are in other prestigious collections such as The British Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Daimler Art Collection in Stuttgart, the DSL Collection in France and the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. There is also a monograph “Zheng Chongbin: Impulse, Matter, Form” edited by the highly regarded scholar and curator Britta Erickson.
