Aranya Art Center North is pleased to present the eponymous solo exhibition of Chinese artist Zheng Haozhong, featuring the artist’s portraits of friends, self-portraits, and studio-themed paintings.
Zheng Haozhong’s works have always focused on people and settings connected to his life. These scenes are almost exclusively drawn from his everyday field of vision, particularly from his studio space. Though artists’ homes and studios have constantly shifted, dispersed, and even disappeared in recent years, Zheng’s painting studio is still frequented by his friends, many of whom are artists, musicians, and writers. These friends are his models, while the artist in turn serves as performer, photographer, or musician in their creations. When the subjects of the painting are close friends, trust and understanding allow the artist to overlook the identity of these people and focus on the construction of the setting and the (anti)narrative, allowing him to unfurl a vast and unfettered portrayal of the inner self on the canvas.
When viewing Zheng Haozhong’s paintings, we are often drawn in by his bold use of negative space and the freedom of his lines, aspects that are intimately linked to his emphasis on improvisation. The negative space symbolizes the “beginning of time.” Against the backdrop of this detemporalized vacuum, the free-flowing lines carve out the trajectory of his mind during the act of painting. By capturing the people and scenes around him, he breathes a dynamic energy and an emotion reminiscent of jazz into his pictures, using different subjects to explore diverse expressions of the same self. For the artist, painting is about how to return to the self, how to paint the self.
Zheng Haozhong
Born 1985 in Shandong province, China. Lives and works in Shanghai.
Zheng Haozhong’s figurative paintings, depicting friends, acquaintances, and himself in his studio, capture the gestures, expressions, and psyches of his sitters. His paintings carry a rhythmic quality with expressive brushstrokes that are freestyle and not confined within a rigid parameter, mirroring the music he plays. In recent works, the prominence of window frames accentuates the domesticity of his paintings, capturing the isolation experienced by individuals during lockdown and COVID restrictions. Zheng delves into an introspective reflection on interpersonal connections, subtly hinting towards the notion of solitude.
Zheng graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2008. In 2014, Zheng’s painting QIUCHEN was awarded the Grand Prize for the John Moores Painting Prize China and was exhibited at museums internationally including the National Museums Liverpool (Liverpool, 2015), Minsheng Museum (Shanghai, 2016), and later exhibited in Beijing and Macao. Zheng has held solo exhibitions in Blindspot Gallery (Hong Kong, 2023), KWM Art Center (Beijing, 2018), and esea contemporary (Manchester, 2016) where he also had an artist residence. Zheng was previously an artist-in-resident at the Gwangju Museum of Art. His works are in the collection of the White Rabbit Gallery, DSL Collection, and the Moegling Foundation.
Zheng is identified by his pseudonym “Li Cha” in his online publications. He is also part of the band Dolphy Kick Bebop and joined the Shanghai Free Art Big Band in 2023.
