Zheng Chongbin

Zheng Chongbin (b. 1961) lives and works in San Francisco. One of the most influential experimental ink painters of the 1980s, he is widely recognized for his work exploring and deconstructing the conventions and constituents of classical Chinese ink tradition and Western pictorial abstraction. Central to his practice is the notion of the world as always in flux, consisting of flows of matter and energy that repeatedly cohere and dissipate. Inherent in pre-modern Chinese and 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 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.

Inspired by the Bay Area’s distinctive atmosphere and rich ecologies, as well as by the California light and space movement, Zheng’s multimedia installation practice explores the delicate interplay of nonparallel lines and planes found within the natural landscapes. Resolving neither into painting, sculpture, nor pure light and space, the artist’s installations insist their material presence through interactions with their surroundings, even as their objecthood dissolves within the spatial experience of their environment. In his video works, Zheng utilizes the human scale of perception to represent processes of nature ranging from the molecular to the topographical and climatic using microscopic and macroscopic imagery and accompanying soundscapes. Meditating on mass, weight, and light, Zheng visualizes the unfolding of natural processes through space and temporality, mining the tradition of landscape through pure abstraction.