This solo exhibition of Zheng Haozhong at the Aranya Art Center North features the artist's paintings centered on three themes: portraits of friends, self-portraits, and the studio. Zheng Haozhong's works always focus on people and environments that are related to his own life, and almost all of these daily landscapes come from his studio space. Even though artist's studios have been gradually relocated, dispersed or even disappeared in recent years, his studio is often visited by his friends, including artists, musicians and writers. These friends are his models, and at the same time he is also an actor, cameraman or musician in each other's creations. When painting with familiar friends, the trust and tacit understanding allows him to ignore the identity of the characters and focus on the scene and (anti-)narrative construction, thus freely opening up an open-ended mental picture of the self on the canvas.
When looking at Zheng Haozhong's paintings, we are always attracted by the bold blankness and free lines, which are closely related to the concept of “improvisation” emphasized by the artist. For the artist, the blank space symbolizes the “beginning of time”, and on top of the vacuum background of de-timing, the free and easy lines outline his inner trajectory when he paints more purely. By depicting the people and landscapes around him, he infuses his paintings with energy and emotions as free and varied as jazz, and explores various expressions of the same self through different objects. For the artist, painting is ultimately about how to return to oneself, how to “paint oneself”.