Zheng Chongbin

San Francisco-based artist Zheng Chongbin centers his artistic practice around the pre-modern Daoist concept that the natural, inorganic world of energy and matter is living and always changing. Considered one of China's most preeminent young experimental ink painters in the 1980s, Zheng systematically explores and deconstructs the classical Chinese ink tradition and Western pictorial abstraction, developing a distinctive body of work that makes the vitality of matter directly perceptible. Inspired by California’s Light and Space movement, Zheng’s commission for ART on THE MART, Chimeric Landscape, transformed 2.5 acres of THE MART into an aperture and a void through rhythm and movement as part of its inaugural program.

Throughout his career of three decades, Zheng Chongbin 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 cohere and dissipate. 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. 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.