On the afternoon of October 15, 2016, “The Outsider – Zheng Zesheng’s Menstruation” opened at the main hall on the 2nd floor of the building 1, Today Art Museum, the exhibition invites Li Xianting and Jia Fangzhou to serve as academic chairs, Ye Yongqing and Sun Mian serve as curators, the exhibition presents more than 50 works created by Zheng Zesheng from 2006 to 2016.

Zheng Zesheng was born in the small village of Chaoshan, Guangdong province. His father got cancer when he was five, he was trafficked and brought to an unfamiliar city when he was six years old, he could only beg on the street using chalk painting, later he had an opportunity to escape, then he hitched a ride and walked for three days, the little boy fled back home, but he was told his father had died. From being trafficked to the death of his father, he experienced suffering again and again, his instinct for survival, then with his instinct in death, he instantly grew into a juvenile.

The poverty of his family made him abandon study and leave his hometown to make money, catching up with the trend of reform and opening up, Zheng earned his first pot of gold, and then he experienced business brilliance, but he fell in love with gambling, encountered bankruptcy, suffered from depression, staged a comeback, religious practice, walking through India ... those winding and rich experiences made him clearly aware of the meaning and pursuit of life. It seems that Zheng Zesheng was born with an artistic birthmark, he then chose painting to convey his own feelings and experiences to others, the use of the media for art to re-awaken the spirituality of the body.

Zheng Zesheng said that, “I will not go painstakingly looking for the so-called physical sense of paradise, in fact, the real paradise has never been missing, it has always been in each person’s heart, as long as you lay everything down, cultivate oneself, it is founded.”

On the theme of “outsiders”, the exhibition curator Ye Yongqing explains that: “Zheng Zesheng is an outsider of the art system, his artistic experience and the source has nothing to do with the history of art.” His works are reminiscent of Dubuffet’s Art Brut, which is filled with the madness, innocence, originality, spirituality, mystery, desire, temperament, flying and corruption of life. His creation is the art of life – obtaining salvation from the joys of life, to find gold from the native state of life: madness, spiritual medium, individual. He uses the creativity and richness that is similar to art brut, to exceed and re-interpret the orthodox art defined by the mainstream, which is part of the “outsider” art.

Yu Dafu evaluated that, all “Zheng Zesheng’s emotions of life are linked together by art, his unspeakable mysterious inner emotions are through passion and will to express all the things that his vision and hand can touch, arriving in years that are more distant than the existence of humans’ souls.”

The so-called art “outsider” Zheng Zesheng adheres to the most essential painting, the most original emotional expression, and the purest spiritual appeal: “I choose to use painting to explore the meaning of life and to find the truth of the soul, painting and the door of soul are slowly opening simultaneously for me. The human landscape and symbolic system which I need both appear in front of me, I begin to use the brush to record everything.”

The exhibition remains on view until October 24.

Text by Lin Jiabin/CAFA ART INFO,  Photo courtesy of the organizer

Translated by Chen Peihua and edited by Sue/CAFA ART INFO