Zheng Shengtian 2009-10-31
Brooklyn,
New York
“The first year, in 1977, all the academies in China had been closed for ten years. If you think about this huge country; for example, zoom in on one city, one student—a talented, young artist wanting to go to school…and multiply that. Imagine the whole of China, with hundreds and thousands of students wanting to go to school. When the School announced they were going to reopen and that students could enroll, we received so many applications and portfolios that the post office had to send the applications to the school by truck.”
Biography:
Zheng Shengtian (b. 1938, Henan Province) is an artist, writer and curator now based in Vancouver, Canada.
Zheng graduated in 1958 from the Zhejiang Acadmy of Art in Hangzhou (now China Academy of Art), where he worked for more than thirty years as a professor and chair of the Oil Painting Department. He was also a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota and at San Diego State University in the 1980s.
Zheng moved to Canada in 1990. From 1996 to 2000, he was Secretary of the Annie Wong Art Foundation and Director of the Art Beatus Gallery in Vancouver. Since 2002, he has been the Managing Editor of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, the only English-language journal on contemporary Chinese art. He has also been a founding member and Board Director of the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art since 1999.
As an independent curator, he has organized and curated numerous exhibitions including ‘Jiangnan: Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art' (Vancouver), the ‘Art of the Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ (Vancouver, Toronto, Winnipeg, Canada), ‘Shanghai Modern’ (Munich, Kiel, Germany), the Shanghai Biennale (Shanghai, 2004), ‘China Trade’ (Vancouver), ‘Reincarnation’ (Toronto) and ‘Art and China’s Revolution’ (New York). He is currently working on the Vancouver Biennale as the Senior Curator for Asia. Zheng is a frequent contributor to periodicals and catalogues of contemporary Chinese and Asian art.
