Zeng Fanzhi is a contemporary Chinese artist based in Beijing. Zeng's works have been praised as possessing an emotional directness, an intuitive psychological sense, and a carefully calibrated expressionistic technique. Born and raised in Wuhan, China, graduated from the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts in 1991. Inspired by China’s ’85 New Wave movement and influenced by Western art, particularly German Expressionism and French Romanticism, Zeng deviated from Social Realism. He focused on daily life subjects. Moving to Beijing in 1993, he felt isolated, leading to his Mask series (1994–2004), reflecting alienation amidst rapid modernization. Zeng's art blends Eastern and Western traditions, exploring societal flux and human existence with bold experimentation and fusion.

One of China’s most acclaimed—and expensive—living artists, Zeng Fanzhi is renowned for gestural, expressionistic paintings that consider the lonely instability of contemporary life and the rapid modernization spurred by the Cultural Revolution. A student of both Eastern and Western art histories, the artist combines elements of communist Social Realism and German Expressionism (particularly the work of Max Beckmann) throughout his portraiture and large-scale, abstracted landscapes. Zeng achieved recognition in the 1990s for his painting series “Hospital” and “Meat,” all rendered in fleshy red and pink tones. Since then, he has exhibited widely in Beijing, Hong Kong, London, Paris, New York, and beyond. Zeng represented China at the 2009 Venice Biennale. In 2014, the Louvre commissioned him to produce a work inspired by Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830). The year before, Zeng’s painting The Last Supper (2001) sold for $23.2 million at auction, setting a major record for an Asian contemporary artist.