 ne day, before he started painting tiny figures in 1995, Zeng Hao dropped by his friend’s new home for a visit. His friend happened to be one of the many  artists who has was enjoying the benefits of China’s booming art market and enjoying the fruits of his labour.
As Zeng wandered through the luxurious house, he noticed the elaborate interior design, expensive furniture and loads of trinkets and appliances. Yet his friend tip-toed around these things – petrified that he would break the expensive objects. Zeng was shocked by this strange relationship between man and object. “People create things, but finally become slaves to them. I am confused about who serves whom.”
This question has remained central to his art work, which gives equal visual weight to both man and object. Dark expanses of canvas are dotted which what look like toy people and objects floating in a cold night sky. “He puts our mundane existence into our view. He painstakingly belittles ‘men’ and enlarges certain ‘objects’ in his painting to equal them in the space of picture,” Feng Boyi says in his article: “People Change but Things Stay: Details in Zeng Hao’s Works.”
Well-known for his painting of tiny men, Zeng Hao was called a representative of “New Imagists” by an art critic Lu Hong.“The artist puts all the images on a flat, opaque background and creates an understandable, relationship between them with minimal effort,” says curator Wu Hung.
 In contrast, his later works have more figurative backgrounds with buildings, woods or blurry cities. For instance, “10 am May 13, 2005”, “Evening July 3, 2004” and “12 PM June 11, 2005” provide a different take on this feeling of isolation. In his recent works, he’s abandoned his tiny men choosing to depict large figures which blend into the background while the floating objects have become the main characters.
Yet unlike other artists of his generation he doesn’t rely on exaggerated caricatures, or on provocative symbols, or political metaphors. Critics say his works display intellectual characteristics or an intellectual approach to color. But in real life, Zeng doesn't fit the image of the old-style Chinese intellectual. For one, he looks nothing like one; and he’s free of pretension or lofty language.
“When I studied in a high school, my dream was to be a farmer," he says. "Growing up during that period, seeing my parents' life, I didn't feel there was anything good about being intellectual," he says.
Zeng's strong distaste for materialism is no doubt informed by his childhood spent during the Cultural Revolution. The idealistic slogans are still imprinted in hims mind, none more so than Chairman Mao's proclamation: "Man will conquer nature."
 In his works, the sense of three-dimensional perspective is all but obliterated. His space is one where time has stopped and all that is left are some trivial little objects. Indeed, it’s hard for post-Cultural Revolution Chinese to have a sense of perspective, about the sweeping changes. But Zeng was old enough to have seen the full arc.
In 1963, Zeng was born into an intellectual family in Kunming, a mild and mild-mannered city in Yunnan Province in southwest China. His parents were university professors. But after the Cultural Revolution got under way in 1966 everything changed. In 1968, the family was banished to another town. Yet they always encouraged him to pursue art.
“My father loved drawing, and he wanted to be an artist when he was a little boy,” Zeng recalls. His father, hoping to live vicariously through his son, forced the young boy into drawing lessons. They often went on sketching trips in the nearby countryside.
Though not passionate about art, Zeng says he was thrilled by the idea of escaping the control of his parents and enrolled at the Affiliated School of Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in Chengdu at the age of 16. Living in the bustling capital of Sichuan, hub of southwest China, Zeng says he was happy to be on his own. The 40-year-old artist smiles mischievously and says: “At the time, I failed to pass seven out of my ten courses. Even the president of the school threatened to kick me out.”
But he didn’t and Zeng graduated from the affiliated school. He failed, however, to get accepted to the sculpture department of Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts and returned to a small city in Yunnan where he became an art teacher.
 While his friends and classmates were on their way to good colleges, good jobs or good opportunities abroad he was stuck in a small middle school in one of the lowest-ranking positions.
But one day in 1985, a former schoolmate lifted him out of his rut. He mailed Zeng an admissions bulletin from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Although Zeng professes to hate studying, he summoned up his will and went to Beijing to take the entrance examination.“I took the same examination along with my students and after it we got together and complained that the exam was too tough to pass,” he says.
But he passed. And in the fall of 1985 he began his studies at the Oil Painting Department in one China’s most prestigious art colleges. Four years on campus, however, failed to instill in him a sense of idealism about art. Those years did, however, make him contemplate his own problems which included interpersonal relations.
Maybe Zeng was a something of a late bloomer as most men his age had already stopped thinking about these things by the time they reached adolescence. But the young artist was diffident since childhood and didn’t experience these interpersonal issues until he reached university.
Zeng now says he made no conscious efforts to address this topic. He says that when he raised his brush, the thought inspired him and simply burst on to his canvas.
 Though Zeng was certain about his subject matter he was still waffling about his future. Once he even thought of giving up. After all, he had no innate love for art – rather it was something forced upon him by his father and something with which he associated failure.
After graduation, he returned again to Yunnan where he received a job offer from a friend who ran a factory employing disabled people. During a period when people were madly panning around for business opportunities, the invitation would have easily lured most people. “It was the first time I seriously questioned whether to continue my life as an artist,” he said. “I had gone so far, and I did not want to give up.”
In the following two years, he worked at the Kunming Education College training other art teachers. It was a leisurely time in Zeng’s life and he used it well. The president of the college even gave him a studio to develop his art. “I painted the whole day until very late. I did nothing else other than that,” he says.
 After amassing a good body of work, Zeng held his first exhibition in Guangzhou in 1992. His early work, "Balloon Series," was featured in both the Second Chinese Contemporary Art Achievement Exhibition and the Nineties Chinese Contemporary Oil Painting Biennale.
Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong, possessed a booming economy but little in the way of culture. At the time it was seen as the playground of the nouveau riche, a bustling, humid city where business came before everything.
Oddly it’s where Zeng’s career really came together. In 1993, he was invited to teach oil painting in Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. “I went to Guangzhou, because I wanted to change myself,” he says. “Guangzhou was a so-called desert of culture and a city preoccupied with business. But we all must face this materialistic life.”
But it seemed that Zeng, was unprepared for the rules of the new world. After four years at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, he still could not adapt to the university’s insufferable politics and was forced to leave. The artist, who was not good at expressing his own thoughts, spent most of his energy in observing the complicated psychology of his colleagues.
A big break came in 1996, when the curator Hans Van Dijk invited Zeng to participate in China: Recent Works from 15 Studios. He followed the exhibition to Munich, Paris and Tokyo and in 1997, he made his first solo exhibition at the Gallery of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.
 After the exhibition he left Guangzhou and its nouveau riche behind and headed for the Beijing – the epicenter of the Chinese art world – where he now lives and works.
“When I arrived in Beijing, I rented an apartment in Huajiadi (a residential area of Chaoyang District in northeast Beijing) with Zhang Xiaogang. Then in 1999, I moved to Tong Town. (located at the east of Beijing) I failed to find any buyers for my paintings that year,” he says with a shy smile.
But Zeng is no longer down on his luck. At the Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong in May 2006, his oil painting “3:00pm, August 17, 2004” fetched over $70,000. Now, his works often sell for $40,000 to $50,000 apiece.
The earliest collector of his works is Chang Tsong-zung, or Johnson Chang, who maintains one of the most important galleries in Hong Kong, Hanart TZ Gallery. Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist also purchased some of his early works.
In his latest series, there are no tiny men, goldfish or television sets. His new works deal with outdoor urban scenery. He’s already collected some source materials, photos of freeways, signs, airport runways and frozen images of planes landing and taking off with large clouds in the pale blue sky. “Every day I see the city and I have a new experience, I try to draw sketch it out.”
 We visited him his current space at the Chaoyang Liquor Factory Art Center on Beihuqu Road in Northeastern Beijing. On his walls were half a dozen paintings. Some were just preparatory sketches, some were in the process of being painted and others were just finished – as evidenced by the wet paint. “I can not settle down on one painting,” he jokes. “If I had to paint one by one, I’m afraid that I could not even finish one piece.” It seems like he’s got a case of creative attention deficit disorder. But it’s hardly a surprise. His whole life in fact is characterized by restlessness – a refusal to stick to one thing or conversely a driving passion for change.
Translated by Wei Ying
images from Arario Gallery (Beijing)
Related Link(s):
·Artist Profile: Zeng Hao
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