Beijing Dangdai Art Fair 2026 will take place from May 21 to 24 at Hall 11 of the National Agricultural Exhibition Center, with May 21–22 as VIP Preview Days and May 23–24 as Public Days. Under the theme “LAND TRACE,” this year’s edition reawakens local experiences and embodied perceptions from the perspectives of geo-culture and historical geography across multiple contexts, further delineating the detailed landscape of contemporary art at a moment of value reshaping.

We will be releasing a series of posters centered on works featured at the Fair. These works not only offer possible interpretations of and responses to “LAND TRACE,” but also serve as preview highlights of key artworks and participating institutions. The poster shared in this edition features a work from YONGLE SPACE — a signature landscape painting by artist Zeng Fanzhi, created at the invitation of the Van Gogh Museum, with Wheatfield as its spiritual blueprint.

About the Artwork

Zeng Fanzhi
Wheatfield
oil on canvas
2017
200 × 350 cm
©Courtesy of the artist and YONGLE SPACE

In 2016, Zeng Fanzhi was invited by the Van Gogh Museum in the Netherlands to create works inspired by Van Gogh’s life experience and artistic world. For the Van Gogh Museum, which rarely holds exhibitions for living artists, this invitation carried special significance. Among the six works Zeng created on this occasion, most took Van Gogh’s self-portraits as a point of departure; only two continued his mature “chaotic brushwork landscape” series. The most important of these is a large-scale piece based on the motif of Wheatfield.

Created in 2017, Wheatfield unfolds from a panoramic perspective. The blue sky and golden fields still faintly retain the most recognizable visual structure of the original work. In this painting, Zeng does not replicate Van Gogh’s thick, swirling, propulsive brushstrokes, but instead uses his mature “chaotic brushwork” language to reawaken the emotions and spiritual power carried by the landscape. The differences and inner resonance between the two artists are thus brought into juxtaposition. Both see landscape as a spiritual vessel, allowing nature to speak for figures and express those ineffable inner stirrings. This series of works revolving around Van Gogh is not a simple act of copying or homage, but rather a form of self-recognition through the mirror of another.

About the Artist

Portrait of Artist
©Courtesy of the artist and YONGLE SPACE

Zeng Fanzhi, born in 1964 in Wuhan, Hubei Province, is a representative of China’s most internationally influential contemporary lyrical expressionist oil painters. He majored in oil painting at the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts in 1987 and graduated from the same department in 1991, after which he engaged in oil painting creation in Beijing. He has received major awards such as the Chinese Contemporary Art Award and the Gold Prize at the International Art Biennale.

Zeng Fanzhi holds an irreplaceable position in the history of contemporary Chinese art and is one of the iconic artists of China’s “Neo-Expressionism.” In the early 1990s, his oil painting series The Hospital and Meat caused a sensation, establishing him as a painter who revealed the spiritual dilemmas of the era and the alienation of the individual. Starting in 1994, his Mask series subverted his earlier expressionist style, using the unified symbol of the mask for the first time to construct a metaphor for the identity of contemporary urban dwellers, with a style that combines intense dramatic tension with an Eastern sense of introverted melancholy. The emergence and maturation of the “Rough Brush” series in the new millennium marked the moment when Zeng Fanzhi truly developed his own unique painting style—one rooted in Chinese cultural context, characterized by calligraphic brushstrokes, and blending Eastern and Western elements—thereby solidifying his outstanding position as a master of contemporary painting. Within the nearly two-decade-long creative process of the “Rough Brush” series, Wheatfield (2017) is undoubtedly the quintessential masterpiece of the series, holding irreplaceable particularity and significance.

Over the years, Zeng Fanzhi’s artistic language has continued to evolve and transform, with each period presenting different themes and explorations of painterly qualities. The only constant is the sense of alienation and absurdity characteristic of contemporary individuals. Regarded as a highly talented contemporary artist, he has also subtly influenced generations of young creators. His works have been collected by numerous art institutions and collectors both in China and abroad, including the National Art Museum of China, the Shanghai Art Museum, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, the Long Museum, the Song Art Museum, the Taikang Art Museum, the Louvre Museum, and others.