ZENG Zhen: Don't Go Gentle into That Twilight: Curated by TAN Wei

Zeng Zhen grew up with deep narrative virtual games. Under the long-term influence of the virtual visual system, surreal visual images have become the main component of his paintings. The virtual characters in the game, the realistic scenery in nature, and the mythological philosophy in history and humanities are intertwined and extended by the artist. The ontology in the virtual world is intersected with the real emotions generated in the real world, creating new visual possibilities on canvas.

Images, shapes, and various visual products are fundamental objects that creators and researchers must face. Various artificial objects mentioned in art history can be the starting point for image research. From grottoes paintings in the Stone Age to the definition of medieval art to various modern-contemporary art movements from the Renaissance till the 20th century, if we focus on the meaning of images and the creative intention of authors, the connotation of images in different periods are subject to different social backgrounds and usages. Take works from the Greek mythological period as an example, most of them are connected to their symbolic meaning, which are meta-images created by taking Greek mythology as a literary text—constructing concepts with natural things as objects and story images as explanatory means. Zeng, instead, uses the mythological concepts and virtual characters he recognized as objects and universally existing natural things as explanatory tools to construct the image stories on canvas. In other words, when the text is endowed with various emotions and concepts with visual interpretation, the so-called mythological stories tend to be more personalized, and naturally connected to the emotional value of human beings. Allowing heartless plants to share sorrow and joy with heroes and gods is what Marx called the “humanization of nature,” in which empathy is naturally generated among viewers.

When describing abstract concepts, Zeng applies a large number of “anthropomorphic” methods, including the confrontation between heroes and providence in Greek tragedies and the devastating tragedies such as the Twilight of the Gods in Nordic mythology. When Plato proposed that artists’ image production was only the imitation of a copy, Renaissance artists completely responded to the criticism of imitation theory on art and images, allowing the image to directly reflect the concept and proving that painters can be on par with humanities scholars by “anthropomorphic” works. Gombrich further pointed out that “anthropomorphic images can be regarded as portraits of Plato’s ideas.” Anthropomorphic images involve offering human characters to things that cannot be directly described by artists, such as love, hate, greed, courage, and other concepts, which can also be roughly summarized as “characters plus accessories equal to concepts.” Zeng utilizes this image production method to more specifically express his complex emotions and divine contemplation interspersed in mythological history and the future of cyberspace.

From a practical perspective, Marx’s proposal of “humanization of nature” refers to the process by which humanity employs labor as a means to transform nature into human society, making it an “extension” of humanity. The transformation is material and ideological, reflecting human empathy for nature. In this process, nature is no longer cold and unfamiliar, but endowed with human characteristics and emotions. Zeng personifies complex thinking, endows the human image with supernatural and mysterious powers, and combines mythological deities with human emotions, desires, and conflicts. In doing so, works are closer to real-life experiences and become a product of aesthetics. As Mr. Zhu Guangqian said, “The world seen with aesthetic vision is purely an image world.” The exhibition theme “Burning at Dusk,” indicating that the gods continued to rush in like moths to the fire regardless of the catastrophe in front of them, is precisely the image world created by Zeng with images.