- Artist or Maker
- Zheng Chongbin
China, Shanghai, born 1961, active San Francisco - Title
- Turbulence
- Culture
- American
- Date Made
- 2013
- Medium
- Ink and acrylic on Xuan paper
- Dimensions
- 125 × 71 × 2 7/8 in. (317.5 × 180.34 × 7.3 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.2014.99
- Collecting Area
- Chinese and Korean Art
- Curatorial Notes
Born in Shanghai in 1961, Zheng Chongbin trained in painting at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now the China Academy of Art) in Hangzhou. An international fellowship brought him to the San Francisco Art Institute, where he received his MFA in 1991. A leader of the contemporary ink painting revival, Zheng is also a philosopher, at ease in multiple cross-cultural traditions and settings. Among other things, he has challenged conventional notions about what one can accomplish with the deceptively minimal medium of ink. He excels, for example, at creating layers of ink that resemble windswept and encrusted sheets of black ice, as in this sheet called Turbulence. Zheng’s tools are brushes, papers, inks, and white acrylic paint. His works usually comprise multiple pieces of xuan paper, and he paints with the sheet lying flat. His art is a combination of his own powerful brushwork and the nearly imperceptible effects of migrating ink and pigment suspended in water. The result of all this action is visible in the finished work, which presents a combination of energies directed and undirected, explosive and calm. Zheng Chongbin constantly experiments with ways to expand the possibilities of ink, and has recently extended his practice into the realms of installation and video art.
Stephen Little
2017
- Selected Bibliography
- Goodall, Hollis, and Robert T. Singer. "Art of Asia Acquired by North American Museums, 2014-2015: Los Angeles County Museum of Art." Archives of Asian Art 66, no.2 (2016): 282-290.
- Little, Stephen. An Introduction to Chinese Paintings in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Los Angeles: Art Catalogues; LACMA, 2017.
- Ferrell, Susanna, editor. Zheng Chongbin: Golden State. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2025.
- Copyright
- © Zheng Chongbin
