Zheng Chongbin was born in Shanghai,China, in 1961.Zheng is currently based in the Bay Area. Zheng graduated from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art) in Hangzhou in 1984 and taught painting there until 1988. In 1989 he received a fellowship from the San Francisco Art Institute to study installation, performance, and conceptual art, receiving his MFA in 1991. A resident of the San Francisco Bay Area for over three decades, Zheng is inspired by the region's distinctive atmospheric and environmental effects and rich ecologies, as well as by the California light and space movement.
Zheng moves freely across a variety of media, a versatility that is highlighted in his large-scale installations I Look for the Sky, currently installed in the atrium of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and Liquid Space, that transformed the Kennin-Ji temple in Kyoto in 2019, along with his immersive video pieces Material Play, shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 2017, and Light and Space, exhibited at the Shanghai Biennale 2016-17 in The Power Station of Art. Complementing these public projects, the current exhibition Levity and Gravity provides contrast and context to Zheng’s artistic practice. The works presented in the exhibition continue his longstanding experimentation with painting for which he has developed a personal language that mixes traditional Chinese elements (ink, Xuan paper) with Western tools and materials (brushes, acrylic, and other media) to create abstract, overlapping planar forms, often mounted on wood or aluminum.
Zheng Chongbin’s works are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), British Museum, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, M+ Museum (Hong Kong), the Marina Bay Sands (Singapore), and the Daimler Art Collection (Germany). He has had solo and group exhibitions at the Hong Kong Museum of Art (Hong Kong), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), LACMA (Los Angeles), Brooklyn Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Asia Society Museum Houston, the Shanghai Art Museum (Shanghai), Shanghai Biennale 2016-2017, the Palazzo Mora, the Venice Biennale (Italy), the University of Alberta Museum, (Alberta, Canada), the Taipei 2010 Contemporary Ink Painting Biennial (Taiwan), the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Asia Pacific Art Museum, Pasadena, the Pusan Museum of Modern Art (South Korea), the Third Chengdu Biennale (Chengdu), and the National Art Museum of China (Beijing).