Zhang Enli, Chinese abstract painter who wasn’t boxed in by his early figurative art

Zhang Enli is a Chinese artist whose 30-year career has often defied mainstream trends. When peers such as Zeng Fanzhi traded dark, expressionistic paintings of the gritty urban underbelly for a brand of gaudy cynicism, Zhang stuck with his dark-hued portraits of the butchers he saw in his neighbourhood wet market. Grim-faced and blood-splattered, they are given pink, sinewy arms that look rather like the raw meat lying on top of their chopping boards. Works such as the “Butcher” series were not as popular with collectors when the Cynical Realism school became a market phenomenon in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but these days, works such as Two Kilos of Beef (1993) and Indignation (1993) are selling for millions of yuan at auction. That’s because Zhang is now represented by a major multinational gallery and his works have been collected by major museums around the world. Paintings by Zhang from the 1990s feature in his largest solo exhibition yet, “A Room that can Move”, at Shanghai’s Power Station of Art museum. Spanning his career and featuring more than 100 works, it is curated by Hou Hanru. Speaking from his studio in Shanghai, Zhang observes the irony of the eye-watering auction prices those early works are fetching. Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi on his experimental Hong Kong show “I sold them for 10,000 yuan [apiece] in the 1990s,” the 55-year-old recalls. Back then, he was a penniless part-time painter teaching at Shanghai’s Donghua University for a monthly salary of 100 yuan. He still remembers the immense elation he felt when he sold his first painting in Shanghai to a Dutch professor from Hong Kong for US$200 in 1990. “I had run out of money at the time. After the sale, I used the money to treat a visiting relative. There was not much material comfort then. The 100 yuan monthly salary helped me fill my stomach at the school canteen. I couldn’t afford painting materials. I found wood myself for making frames. The paintings [from that era] were made on thin canvas … due to the scarcity of materials,” he says. How Zhang’s life has changed since. His latest paintings, sold through Hauser & Wirth at this month’s West Bund Art & Design fair in Shanghai, fetched between US$200,000 and US$500,000 each. Zhang says he has changed the way he paints over the years in a way that often parallels changes in the material aspects of Chinese cities as they went from poverty to gluttony. “In late 1990s to early 2000s, people’s lives got better. Dining had become a big enjoyment. There were many huge restaurants then which could sit 20 people at a table,” he recalls. Paintings like Eating (2000) and Pub (1998) portray corpulent figures indulging in smoking, and eating and drinking avariciously. After that period, he abruptly switched from directly representing his keen observations of human affairs to producing painstakingly realistic paintings of the most mundane items, and of empty spaces seemingly devoid of a human presence. We can see traces of human use in objects, and so the objects are mirrors to the human world, he says. The year 2000 was a watershed, he said. That was when he started painting objects such as chairs, paper boxes and other kinds of containers. Zhang’s obsession with containers can be seen in a huge installation in the current exhibition, composed of more than 1,000 paper boxes, each of which is covered by his painting. These empty boxes, like the many empty buckets that he painted (three of which were bought in 2007 by the Tate collection in the UK), may be seen as a reaction against our addiction to spectacles and materialistic cravings. The loose, abstract brush marks on the paper boxes are also indicative of a more recent switch to abstraction. He says his expressionistic figurative paintings came from a time when he was filled with youthful rage and anxiety. As the years passed, he has grown more mellow and his perspective has broadened, he says. “2000 is the year for my change. I did different kinds of [artistic] trials. In the end, I took out the dark hues [from my works]; what is left is lots of lines,” he says. Lines, after all, are a key element in Chinese art, he says, and his recent abstractions are often painted using traditional Chinese techniques, a point of departure from Western abstract and conceptual art development. The way the exhibition is designed suggests that there is always a dialogue between the old and the new for Zhang, rather than a linear evolution from the figurative art to abstraction. Visitors enter through a corridor decorated with old light bulbs and other used items that show his interest in finding human traces through objects and spaces. There is also an area near the start of the show displaying six old analogue televisions that show videos of people from all around the world talking about how they have worked with Zhang in organising the show. “I feel lucky that I am still filled with passion to create and express myself. Contemporary Chinese artists are staging shows all around the world now to let more people see our works. If I am lucky, I can still live and work for three more decades. There’s still a long road ahead of me.” A Room that can Move is being held at the Power Station of Art museum at 200 Huayuangang Road, Huangpu District in Shanghai until March 7.