You've got to hand it to him
Zeng Fanzhi is known primarily for his Mask series of paintings. One of these, Mask Series 1996 No 6, sold for HK$75.4 million at a Christie's auction in May 2008 - a record for a Chinese contemporary artist at the time. It features eight Young Pioneers, the youth movement of the Communist Party, with red scarves and white masks. If you have not seen it, you've almost certainly seen something similar, genuine or copied, because many people now associate Zeng with perpetually grinning, white-masked faces.
Yet he hasn't done a Mask painting since 2004. Although you can glimpse the beginnings and the end of that theme in the arc of his solo exhibition at Gagosian on Pedder Street - the gallery's first with a Chinese artist - there's just one officially labelled example, Mask Series No 13, from 1994.
Instead, there are 17 portraits plus a little oil on canvas from 2009 entitled Boots. It's wittily hung at right angles to a 2009 self-portrait in which Zeng is barefoot. Gagosian is showing us a bigger picture through this mini retrospective.
The earliest work on display, Haircut (1989), is clearly influenced by the German Expressionists: its sea-green introversion is the antithesis of the red-flag-waving-and-cheerleading school of Chinese art. There's a 1991 triptych from his Hospital series on the gallery's back wall; there are a couple of his Meat paintings; there are portraits of other artists (including two fine ones of British figurative painter Francis Bacon and a marvellous rendition of Lucian Freud); and right at the entrance, there's another self-portrait, completed this year. Its clear-eyed placement seems to be a physical statement: I have arrived.
That portrait features what has been a Zeng motif from the start - huge, articulated hands. So the first thing one needs to check, with apologies to Freud's grandfather, is size. The artist willingly holds his own out, palm up.
They're not noticeably large; along his right thumb, there's a jagged scar where he caught it in a door in 2004. He had to go to a Beijing hospital and have six stitches and the injury rendered him unable to paint for two months. When he restarted, he began to use his left hand. Now he uses both. The impressionist imperfections of the left create less controlled work than the right.
Zeng describes this, through an interpreter, amid the pungent fumes of the Red Chamber Cigar Divan in Pedder Building where he has come to escape the frenetic atmosphere of his press opening. During the interview, his left hand occasionally covers the lower half of his face as he's listening; his right hand holds a reeking Trinidad Reyes. He's wearing a military-style jacket; it's white and by Hermes.