REFLEXION is pleased to announce Another Day, a solo exhibition of the new paintings by artist ZENG Hong, opening on September 20th, 2025. A constant question in ZENG’s practice is how can life and art be mapped together? This question is one he never ceases to deliberate on and continually seeks to renew. The exhibition title, Another Day, speaks of time and the shift between the new and the old. It also evokes the unavoidable, nuanced and intricate reality we face in life.
Zeng Hong has always built his work on the interwined relations between reality and art. His earlier work, The Worker’s Dormitory, captures how the human body is controlled and conditioned by biopolitics. Later, this evolved into the language of deconstructive squares and lines, exploring how image language can relate to the present in an autotelic state. Since first painting the character “The People” in 2017, Zeng Hong has gradually developed another kind of path connecting life and painting. In The People, the strokes for the character are packed into the canvas like threads, quietly woven or hidden in the painting. The literal meaning sinks into the background, giving way to their former qualities; the strokes are no longer linguistic signs but lines. Language becomes lines; the act of reading gives way to looking.
The three works titled Scientific Labour Manual originally date from a practical propaganda handbook called How to Work, published during the 1920s Soviet Scientific Organization of Labour movement. The handbook breaks down every step in manufacturing into manageable procedures, using stopwatches and cameras to track work movements and removing repetitive actions. So workers’ actions become muscle memory, and disciplines become second nature. Moreover, the book claims
that robotic processes are not a form of enslavement but a way to liberate workers and allow them to be the artists of the manufacturing process. The Scavenger and The Stone–Mover , both created in 2025, are paintings based on sketches of characters from Zeng Hong’s 2016 video Robust Woman. He observed a female quarrier in the waste of an urban village, who repeats a few dreary movements the whole day. Another series, Soup, Medicine Box (Milnacipran), and Medicine Box (Back) , all created in 2015, is his interpretation of his search for medical attention in 2022. He felt unwell and sought a doctor’s advice, but has not been diagnosed with a specific disease. The doctor prescribed several psychotropic drugs to him. He eventually decided to paint the objects from this period as a way to record his struggle during that time.
Words, laborers, and drugs are his hands-on experience during this stage of this artistic practice. They serve as the vital links between life and painting, leading him to see the world through his own eyes. In the process of turning imagination into expression, the media is not a transparent path, but also a system of filtering and reconstruction, one that is substantive with its own materiality and historical context.
ZENG Hong was born in Ziyang, Sichuan in 1974. He graduated from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. Now lives and works in Beijing.Major exhibitions include: Zeng Hong solo exhibition: Another Day, REFLEXION, Beijing (2025); tone, REFLEXION, Beijing (2024); Walking Guide, Long March Space, Beijing (2023); Cloud Sculpture_Three Spaces, Song Art Museum, Beijing (2023); Patchwork Leviathan, Bridge Projects, Los Angeles, USA (2020); Cloud Sculpture_Three Spaces, Song Art Museum, Beijing (2023); Patchwork Leviathan, Bridge Projects, Los Angeles, USA (2020); Hungry Geography, Taikang Space, Beijing (2019); Factory, Machine, and Poet’s Words-Real Light and Shadow in Art, Building A07, 798 Art District, Beijing (2019); Happy People, Zhongjian Art Museum, Beijing (2019); Fortress, One-Way Gallery, Beijing (2018); Zeng Hong Solo Exhibition: Quanderni Rossi, Ginkgo Space, Beijing (2018); Zeng Hong Solo Exhibition: Unknown Form, Yang Gallery, Beijing (2017); Zeng Hong Solo Exhibition: Key-Frame Extraction, Telescope, Beijing (2015); Zeng Hong Solo Exhibition, Yang Gallery, Beijing (2015); Zeng Hong Solo Exhibition, Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing (2012), etc.
