Zheng Haozhong: Lee Cha

Who is Lee Cha?

Without a doubt, this character “Lee Cha” should be the protagonist of this exhibition.

Although storyboard or comic strip-like formal separations often appear in artist

Zheng Haozhong’s paintings, they offer no clear or logical narrative. From these

linearly divided compositions, we can only intermittently discern certain figural

shapes, postures, personalities, and scenarios derived therein. Through this we

gather various characteristics and clues related to the identity of “Lee Cha,” from his

life’s physical routine to an ineffable, hidden consciousness, provoking us to consider

whether this figure “Lee Cha” is actually real, or fictional.

The majority of the exhibition’s destructive tableaus are drawn from life. The creator

lives in a small, coastal town. His work largely relies on this natural environment, as

well as the few friends and relatives around him with whom he is close. He has built

a small, carefree world with himself as the absolute center. This lifestyle, a certain

contentment in mastering one’s small lot, and a painting practice built on a sense of

trust are perhaps shackles to his work. And yet the artist does achieve a certain

relative freedom in this.

This freedom is manifest in his mastery of the picture plane itself—what can remain,

what can be abandoned. The artist seizes upon dynamic changes that happen on

site, from a model who momentarily stands up, to the sprouting and withering of a

tree’s leaves throughout the year. Through his choices and adjustments on the

canvas, everything seems masterfully handled. Academic training has familiarized

him with the relationships between line and plane, positive and negative space,

abstraction and realism, looseness and restraint. Some works seem as if they were

made in one stretch. However, each of these pieces takes into account factors of

time, temperature, perspective, and other considerations, recombining different

dimensions of external appearance on the same canvas that ultimately evolves into

a perfect accident. Stripping away its fractured skin, his painting is like a process of

painstaking cultivation, maintaining a state that is closest to true nature. Outside of

the artist’s plans, he also embraces a delightful sense of chance, yet still the

composition, resonance, and layering of the different elements also abides by certain

principles. The work ultimately grows into a reasonable conclusion, giving off a

certain palpable sense of ease and maturity.

On the other hand, at times this freedom is also manifest in the artist’s private verdict

of certain targeted judgments. For instance, he will find some excuse to paint a

clothed model nude or dress a man in a woman’s pink outfit. In the last work of his

series “Qiu Chen”, Zheng had a falling out with his close friend and, feeling at a loss,

decided to burn Qiu Chen’s hair in the painting as an act of revenge. The model’s

sudden departure, leaving the artist to a situation in which all that remained was the

artist himself, provided Zheng with an opportunity to investigate the self, even if it

was a last resort. In this series of paintings the artist seemingly strives to defend

himself: either by way of tender monologue or intense interrogation, they oscillate

between narrative and unconscious rambling.

What these fragmentary works collectively foreshadow is not merely the image of

some “other” from the artist’s everyday life—a powerful “ego” can’t restrain itself from

encroaching and controlling. Always partly hidden and partly visible, spanning

throughout its entirety, the ego evitably pushes the viewer’s attention toward the

nature that underlies all intent. This includes the artist himself. What’s interesting is

that this inward observation perhaps originates in a narcissistic love and adoration.

The mirror has replaced the water’s surface, realizing a series of slightly affected

self-portraits. However, compared to the phantom in the mirror, the most truly

engaging self-evaluation exists within the circuit of interactions between the artist

and the small world he has delineated for himself. It is an ego hijacked by an

unavoidable reflexive power, as if laid beneath the pale, glaring, shadowless lamp of

an operating room, naked and dialyzing all the minutiae of the spirit beneath the skin,

including those lesions that have already infected the marrow. Humanity’s pride,

indolence, servility, and cowardice have created a situation in which self-perception

is like an arduous march forward in shackles.

Even more unfortunate, the perceptions and thoughts born from all these paths are

treasures that belong to Zheng Haozhong alone; painting is thus a form of

squandering. Stemming from a superstitious belief in insinuation and metaphor, we

can only rely on the strange and mysterious images within the artworks to guess at

the impulses that drive them. Nietzsche’s emphasis on the instinctive ability of the

unconscious, Freud’s theory that “the unconscious is the true psychical reality,”

Jung’s profound belief that psychic phenomenon must necessarily adhere to laws

outside of the laws of physics—all could be used as footnotes to Zheng’s painterly

rhetoric. Religious symbols evocative of “pentagram worship” and augury allow the

painted image to break free from everyday experience and memory, slipping into

the more profound and unpredictable “collective unconscious.” The artist eliminates

dependence upon physical time and banal space, taking the world of images

through the gash he has torn open. That uncontrolled ignorance forever inspires

fear and intimidation, as if the artist one day discovered he faced a shattering mirror.

As with countless other paralyzing occurrences, and all he can do is ascribe them to

fate and cast them into the underworld.

People no longer feel a sense of curiosity when faced with familiar things. When

absence arises they are far more able to capture the gaze, and from there the divine

appears as reality. The excitement of reading an artwork is because, in that moment,

it is as if we have collided with a mysterious and true instinct that lies hidden in that

which comes after. “Lee Cha” is both a figure in the painting and the figure who

paints. He is constantly reborn, yet he cannot break from the past. This exhibition is

only a beginning, letting us first meet this man named “Lee Cha.”