Zeng Fanzhi at Hauser & Wirth New York: Planets Made of Brushstrokes

Stand far back and you see a landscape: a jagged ridge, a dark horizon, perhaps the surface of a world no one has visited. Walk closer and it falls apart into bars of unmixed colour, each one still wet-looking, each one disturbed by the next. That double experience is the point of Zeng Fanzhi at Hauser & Wirth New York, on view at the gallery’s 22nd Street space in Chelsea from 5 November 2026 to 16 January 2027. It is, according to the gallery, the Beijing-based painter’s first exhibition in New York City in more than a decade.

Masks, meat and a long road to abstraction

Zeng was born in Wuhan in 1964 and graduated from the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts in 1991. He first made his name with expressionist figuration: the Hospital Triptychs (1991–92), the Meat Series (1992–93) and, above all, the Mask Series (1994–2004), whose smiling, white-faced figures became emblems of a rapidly changing China. In 2002 he began the Abstract Landscape series, and in 2019 he moved decisively toward wet-on-wet, heavily impastoed abstraction. Since 2009 he has also worked on handmade paper. The gallery lists Cézanne, Bacon, de Kooning, Beckmann and the German Expressionists among his touchstones.

His institutional profile is formidable: a 2024 exhibition in Venice organised by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Near and Far/Now and Then”; a 2023 show in Shanghai; a 2017 project at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam; works in LACMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, SFMOMA, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, the Pinault Collection and M+. Hauser & Wirth has represented him worldwide since 2018, and the press release notes two institutional solo shows planned for 2027, one in Europe and one in Asia.

Mélange optique: how the paintings are built

The technical heart of the new work is what the gallery calls “mélange optique”, or optical mixing. Instead of blending colours on a palette, Zeng places them side by side on the canvas and lets the eye do the mixing. He paints wet-on-wet, often with several brushes held at once, so that each new pass of oil drags and disturbs the layers beneath it. CULTURED magazine connects the method to Impressionist and Post-Impressionist layering, and notes that his recent study of classical Chinese painting philosophy has pushed the work further toward abstraction.

The result is painting that changes with distance. Fabrice Hergott, director of the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, is quoted on the gallery’s page observing that against deep black, “the colours acquire an extraordinary radiance.” That black matters: many of the new canvases set luminous strokes against dark grounds, so colour seems to glow rather than sit on the surface.

What is in the show

Every painting is titled Untitled and dated between 2024 and 2026, and several are monumental. Among those illustrated by the gallery: an eight-panel canvas from 2024 measuring 300 by 600 centimetres; a four-panel work from 2025, 300 centimetres square; a diptych from 2026 spanning 440 centimetres. The imagery suggests alien or celestial terrain — jagged ridges, black horizons, grids and lines that hint at mapping or excavation. The press release frames them as meditations on time, memory and humanity’s place in a larger continuum.

The surprise is sculptural. A new stone stabile, shaped like an obelisk and banded in blue and cream, stands among the paintings. The gallery likens it to an artefact dug up from one of the painted planets — a way of carrying the canvases’ imagined geology into three dimensions.

Chelsea, Hauser & Wirth and the timing

The 22nd Street building is one of Hauser & Wirth’s flagship spaces, large enough to hang multi-panel works without crowding. Opening in early November, the exhibition coincides with New York’s autumn auction season, when collectors from Asia and Europe are in town — a fitting moment for an artist whose market spans both.

Why it matters for collectors and painters

For collectors, this is a chance to see Zeng’s current direction at full scale, between a Venice presentation and two museum shows announced for 2027. It also clarifies a career often reduced to the Mask paintings: the abstraction here is not a departure but the outcome of two decades of landscape work.

For painters, the show is a masterclass in colour temperature and surface. Optical mixing is an old idea; what Zeng adds is speed and pressure — the wet layer fighting the one below. It is worth studying up close, then from across the room.

Visiting information

Hauser & Wirth New York, 542 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011. 5 November 2026 – 16 January 2027. Open Tuesday to Saturday, 10:00–18:00. Tel. +1 212 790 3900, [email protected]. No opening reception was listed. See the official Zeng Fanzhi exhibition page, our Zeng Fanzhi New York listing, and more shows on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.