Lot 203: Zheng Delong , Untitled oil on canvas

signed in Chinese and Pinyin and dated 05.19 on the reverse oil on canvas

59 1/8 by 82 5/8 in. 150.3 by 210 cm.

Born in 1976 in Chengdu, in Sichuan Province, Zheng Delong is among the few contemporary Chinese painters who is an autodidact. Far from a deficit, his lack of formal training makes the natural fluidity of his representational skills all the more impressive. Though fascinated by painting as a teenager, in part due to his father's own collecting interests, it was not until the late 1990's that Delong established a studio in Chengdu and began his career.

Zheng's work is characterized by striking images - portraits of both humans and animals - comprised of powerful colours and shapes. Executed with a swirling brushstroke and a metallic or liquid appearance, Zheng's works infuse nature's organic forms with the artist's imagination, fleshing out subjects of figurative representation with an abstract vocabulary that is reminiscent of Salvador Dali in its precise details and technical accomplishment. Amorphous, complicated surfaces come to life as vibrant, recognizable forms at one moment and then dissolve into pure painterly effects at the next. Zheng foregrounds this tension between abstraction and representation, and its delight is the underlying subject of his work.

Although this dual function, inherent to the painter's practice, has been a central pursuit of many Modern and contemporary artists in the West, Zheng's work is uncharacteristic and idiosyncratic in the context of contemporary Chinese art, in which overt cultural references abound. Instead, Zhang's love of his craft seems to borrow from the theory of the five elements - wood, fire, earth, metal and water - and their metamorphosing processes as a means of exploring and laying bare in painting the composition of the natural world around us.