Informed by many years of research into color theory and the paint-layering techniques pioneered by theImpressionists and Post-Impressionists, Zeng’s latest paintings employ the principle of ‘mélange optique,’ or‘optical mixing,’ in which hues are layered and placed alongside one another alla prima on the canvas ratherthan blended on the palette. Seen from a distance, these coalesce into images of landscapes and geologicalformations; observed up close, that legibility dissolves into mesmerizingly complex fields of pure pigment.

Zeng’s dramatic optical effects are the result of a highly kinetic process: working wet-on-wet, Zeng uses multiplepaint brushes at once, creating twin marks that are directed yet deliberate in their loss of total control. Each newtier of oil paint disrupts the ones still actively drying beneath it. His decision to deliberately undermine his ownauthority over the final image—a process that distances his hand from what it lays down—results in the definingdynamism of his art’s physical surfaces. Zeng’s approach harkens to the perceptual experiments of 19th centurymasters while pushing into a distinctly contemporary expression: his grand oils evoke both the dense impasto ofpointillism while manifesting the fractured pixelation of 21st century digital imagery.

In these works, Zeng’s visions evoke unfamiliar worlds beyond any fixed sense of time or place, appearingboth futuristic and prehistoric. Jagged formations evoke the rugged terrain of an uncharted planet, where rockformations, trees, bodies of water and enigmatic alien presences appear within the landscape. Beyond them,pitch-black horizons open onto the infinite expanse of the universe. Across these imagined geological strata,radiant swaths of turquoise, yellow and deep crimson appear like crystalline fossils or fragments of bioluminescentmatter. Central to these works is the tension between structure and the unknown: precise grids and lines suggestsystems of mapping and excavation, while the movement and accumulation of Zeng’s brushwork disrupt theorder they establish. Several works collapse multiple spatial planes within a single composition, creating a senseof disorientation and suggesting a world that feels both unfamiliar and otherworldly.

The new sculpture on view extends these ideas and techniques into three dimensions: a blue onyx obelisk-likeobject suggests both abstract form and an artifact from another as-yet untraversed place. Although constructedfrom naturally occurring gemstone, this blue and cream banded quartz stabile strikes the viewer as somethingexcavated from the imagined planets depicted in Zeng’s paintings. Like those canvases, it occupies an ineffablerealm between image and matter. The artist’s oscillation between landscape, abstraction and imagined archaeologyinvite reflection on time, memory and humanity’s place within a vastly larger continuum.

Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.