Zeng Zhenwei is a monumental sculptor who experienced the Cultural Revolution in his childhood and adolescence. He devoted his life to restoring the beauty of the urban space, to designing its landscape, its furniture, its monuments. He teaches urban landscape at the University and teaches monumental art at the School of Fine Arts. President of the Association of Chinese Sculptors, he is very representative of the current desire of artists to participate in the decoration of the city, in the celebration of its history, in the symbolization of its places.
His creation is a synthesis of modernity and the fundamentals of ancestral art. Concerned with the context, his work goes against the current of monumental international kitsch. With new materials, new formats imposed by urban architecture, he breathes new life into the Chinese taste for perpetual movement, the metamorphic fluidity of the four elements. He is a master of space. His work oscillates between strong polarities: highly stylized abstraction, calligraphy and virtuoso figuration. We recognize in its monuments the spirit of Canton, a city of entrepreneurs and merchants, a maritime city and open to influences from the East and the West. Its “signature” is “vital momentum”.
(By Aude de Kerros)