Zeng Yongning - "Brilliant Radiance" Solo Exhibition

Text and photos by Chen Chi-Hsiang. Dates: January 25 to April 14. Venue: Changhua County Museum of Fine Arts.

"Image is a feeling, color is an argument."

Born in Lukang in 1978, Zeng Yongning is one of Taiwan’s most outstanding color magicians and the most dazzling figure among the new generation of Taiwanese painters. He is renowned for his radiant, original ballpoint pen drawings, exploring new painting vocabularies under the spirit of modernism. Focusing on paper-based works, he creates pieces that are both "blossoming like brocade" and "brilliantly radiant." His inspiration stems from traditional folk art forms, colors, and cultural decorations of his homeland. The myriad forms and vibrant, brilliant colors construct a kaleidoscopic, dazzling decorative style filled with local energy, consciousness, and resonance. Graphics represent the intensity of will, while color becomes the temperature of emotion. As he states, "image is a feeling, color is an argument," or "image as body, color as soul." His shimmering visual effects reveal a delicate, optimistic, rhythmic aesthetic of joy. The "blossoms" mandalas serve as the painter's alchemy of life, carrying his rich emotions and spiritual consciousness.

Zeng’s most distinctive style is this decorative aesthetic of joy. For him, form and color are inseparable; one must contemplate form, combined with a rich imagination for color. He has no taboos or limits regarding color, favoring pure, bright, high-chroma hues. They are sometimes gentle and harmonious, other times bold and contrasting, aiming to liberate traditional color and express immense tension. Mysterious colors reach their peak in his intuition and imagination, making him the most outstanding color magician in contemporary Taiwan. Gauguin said: "The sensory stimulation that color brings us is itself a mystery; therefore, logically, it can only be used like a mystery. Each time, using color is not for depiction, but to take the musical sensation flowing from color itself, its qualities, its inner mysterious power. Through exquisite harmony, symbols can be created. Color vibrates like music, capable of touching the most universal, ubiquitous, and extensive inner forces of nature."