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Time: May 2014 - March 2016
Venue: St. Urban Monastery complex, sculpture park-art-st-urban
Artist: Zeng Chenggang, Beijing
Curator:
Michael Suh, Director of MOCA Beijing and vibrARTion projects
Gertrud Aeschlimann, Director of art-st-urban
ZENG Chenggang, one of China's leading sculptors, shows large-scale bronze and stainless steel sculptures in his solo exhibition at the monastery complex of St. Urban. The title “The Spiritual Passages” connects the three topics “Lotus”, “Animal Series” and “The Prophets”. Zeng's sculptures are not merely a simple representation of objects, but also an expression of their inner nature. Thus his works provide a comprehensive insight into the cultural tradition of China. In this sense, his worldview is transversal, from the present to the past, from realism to the spiritual. Zeng's sculptures are not merely a simple representation of the objects, but a working out of their essence. Thus, his themes cover a wide cultural spectrum, which includes the entire Chinese cultural tradition. In this sense, his ideology is overarching; it traverses the current time to historical epochs, from the realistic sphere to the spiritual.
After training at prestigious art academies in China in the early 80s when China began to open up to the world, Zeng encountered the merger and collision of Eastern and Western cultures right from the start of his artistic career. In terms of sculpture, China is profoundly influenced by the time-honoured tradition of ancient sculpture spanning over 5,000 years - a conceptual symbolic and cultural form with the unchanging features of Eastern aesthetics and ideology that appear in ancient sculpture above all as the result of the continuity of Chinese artistic traditions. In the twentieth century, Western art found its way into China, ranging from classical Western sculpture to modernist sculpture, and had an enormous influence on Chinese sculpture with its many genres and schools. This is especially true for Chinese sculptors who studied in Europe and the former Soviet Union, where they met a strongly divergent system from Chinese sculpture that they then used as a foundation for Chinese sculpture. For a long time the Western system was used as a model in sculpture training and teaching and the Chinese tradition was put down as decadent art form that should be ignored and discarded along with its culture-creating identity. In the “China Art Academy,” the most prestigious state art academy in the south of China, Zeng was trained in the Western sculptural tradition, especially in figurative modelling. Zeng was immediately confronted with the challenge to link the Western tradition to the Chinese sculptural tradition in the first phase of his creative career. Even more important for him, however, was how to integrate the legacy of ancient Chinese sculpture, underpinning his artistic ideology and promote it. Zeng is fully aware of these challenges. Through his dedication to the enormous wealth of classical Chinese culture and the recognition of the charm of the local culture, which manifests itself in ancient Chinese objects such as bronzeware, terracotta warriors, Buddhist sculptures and folk sculpture, he succeeds in diverting his artistic ideology away from the dominance of Western art and to focus his attention back onto the Chinese tradition. And his works begin to clearly express his new quest, which means a return to Chinese sculptural tradition - in the figurative sense, an illumination of his own artistic world through the illuminating brilliance of Chinese sculptural tradition. Therefore, it can be said that Zeng's art possesses the incomparable “touch” of a renewed tradition.
