Shanghai-born Zheng Chongbin is well-known for installations that are ‘neither painting nor sculpture’, black and white graphic abstract paintings with dramatic strokes and, recently, asymmetrical canvases.
Zheng graduated from the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou in 1984, but remained in the school as a teacher for four more years while also honing his craft. During this time, he was fortunate enough to stage his first solo show at the Shanghai Museum of Art. Soon after, he received a fellowship from the San Francisco Art Institute where he completed a Master in Fine Arts, focusing on installation, performance and conceptual art.
His most famous light and space installation, Wall of Skies, was shown at INKstudio in Beijing in 2015 and at the 11th Shanghai Biennale from 2016 to 2017. Another well-received installation, Liquid Space, was unveiled in Japan in 2019. This artwork featured a three-dimensional wall sculpture mounted on custom-made honeycomb-shaped aluminium panels. It was particularly special because it reflected Zheng’s passion for Zen and was site-specific to Ryōsokuin, a sub-temple of Kenninji, deemed the oldest Zen temple in Kyoto.
Another monumental undertaking was Chimeric Landscape, an environmental video installation shown at the 2015 Venice Biennale and Art Basel Hong Kong in 2017.
In the 1980s, M+ museum in Hong Kong started acquiring his works as part of a documentation of his career. Two major New York museums acquired his abstract paintings – Unfolding Landscape (2015) by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Skylines (2014) by the Brooklyn Museum.
In 2017, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) featured Zheng’s Turbulence (2013) in a joint exhibition with Roy Lichtenstein. This was followed up by a solo exhibition called Golden State in 2025. That year, Zheng also unveiled a permanent installation at the Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne, Germany, the first public art project financed by the Cologne government.
His works are in the collections of The British Museum in London, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Daimler Art Collection in Stuttgart, the DSL Collection in France and the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. In 2014, INKStudio New York published Zheng Chongbin: Impulse, Matter, Form, a series of essays that highlight the prolific ink master’s art edited by the highly regarded scholar and curator Britta Erickson.
Zheng lives and works in both Shanghai and San Francisco.
