Zheng Chongbin’s Dialogue With the Golden State

Ut supra, sic infra. As above, so below. This is the ethos of Zheng Chongbin’s design philosophy. Based in San Francisco’s Bay Area, Chongbin creates paintings by layering swaths of ink and paint upon one another, transforming canvases into topographic elements. He lets his canvases breathe; he lets them react naturally to the paint—his work is peeling, pitting, cracking, seeping into the canvas. His paintings bear likeness to natural formations from mountain peaks, riverbeds and fault lines to blood capillaries, skin matrices and synapses. They bear witness to the viewer as much as the viewer does to them. Chongbin furthermore embraces the entropic movements of the paint upon the canvas and, in doing so, instills his work with an interiority that, although invisible to the viewer, is instinctually felt by them.

Through his holistic practice spanning painting, light-and-space installation and digital media, Chongbin has graphed ecologies and vitality across his work, muddling our perception of sentience and life. In “Zheng Chongbin: Golden State,” his solo exhibition at LACMA, he casts his eye upon California’s expansive geography. Comprising the artist’s earlier works alongside newer offerings, the exhibition is a systematic symphony of image and composition that privileges experience and temporality over didactic interpretation.

“It’s an environment I’m dealing with. It’s a living thing,” Chongbin told Observer, explaining how his practice revolves around the unique, organic quality behind each subject. “My sensibility—in extension to [art]—is it feels like a part of your body… not in the traditional way, but the habitual way, in a way that you interact with your body extensions. And so you feel like dealing with and collaborating with living things… You’re not the protagonist. You are actually facilitating what happens.”

Born in Shanghai in 1961, Chongbin was brought up during China’s Cultural Revolution and thus trained in classical Chinese art forms, particularly within the ink tradition. In 1978, China’s Open Door Policy allowed an influx of Western ideas, materials and art forms that had previously been forbidden. Among these Western art traditions, Chongbin was most influenced by Abstract Expressionism, German Expressionism and the Light and Space movements, along with specific artists such as the visceral figuration of Francis Bacon, the conceptual installations of Robert Irwin and the sculptural forms of Larry Bell. 

These inspirations are easily perceptible in Chongbin’s work, which shares a visual kinship with modern Western art movements while maintaining dialogue with the ink traditions in which he was classically trained. In this vein, Chongbin intentionally grants his work its own psychology, allowing art to have its own internal world that extends beyond himself, the peripheries of art movements and the borders of countries, and instead arrives directly in front of the audience, whomever and wherever they are. His physical practice, of course, reflects this dynamic—his final pieces, regardless of medium, are often beset with texture and kineticism. They share a palpable lifeblood.

One of Chongbin’s few paintings to utilize color, Golden State (2024), with its bright yellow swaths of color, by strokes of black, gray and white, represents the intense sunlight of California, banded with belts of trees, rain fog, fire scars and earthquake fault lines. For this painting, Chongbin chose to paint on shrimp paper, a light material made from the bark of sandalwood, and in doing so gave Golden State a unique, breathable quality. Chongbin gives his materials agency, allowing the paint to crack and fissure as new layers are applied while still maintaining its bold presence and—in the case of Golden State—its brilliant color.

“It feels like ecologies,” Chongbin said, recalling the effect of the paint penetrating microfibers, coursing color through the paper’s delicate veins. “Everything [that goes] through is my skin… things not only happen on the top, but also happen in the middle of space [and] into the other side. It’s very much a living organism. The space changes and the surface becomes a space… You have this kind of indexical trace of the classic methodology of the work.”

Though, as noted, Chongbin rarely paints with color, his paintings are often in dialogue with one another, not only in form and context but in composition as well. Turbulence (2013) and Golden State are operational foils of one another. While Golden State primarily looks to the skies of California, reproducing its dappled sunlight through elements of nature, Turbulence looks to the earth; its bands of black paint, puddled by various ink blots, resemble mountain basins, rocky ridges, igneous extrusions and cooling magma. Both paintings, as well as most of Chongbin’s work, consider the spatial experience of the environment. Both are monumental pieces, climbing eight, nine or ten feet high, enveloping the viewer in the sublimity of their ecologies.

“I always explore… what’s happened on the surface [and] what’s happened underneath,” Chongbin said. “All of those bold lines are a cast of what’s happening underneath. The water is actually like rushing down through the themes, through the slope and goes underneath and pushes out. I want to instantiate nature rather than depicting it.”

Chongbin regaled us with stories of his adventures on hiking trails in the foothills of Marin County and wandering the steely beaches of Northern California. He saw “the dead things come alive.” His installation, Chimeric Landscape (2015), was inspired by one such encounter. Chongbin described looking at a sand dollar awash on the shore and seeing a multitude of lifeways. He remarked with wonder at the creature’s iridescence as it shimmered in the sunlight. He marveled at its respiration—its “millions of little lights flickering” as the sand dollar’s velvety matrix of pores undulated gently.

With Chimeric Landscape, he weaves short clips of water, ink, cell functions and other ephemera into Euclidean geometries that twine and break only to reform again. The installation celebrates the little breaths of life that these inanimate objects take while deconstructing their spatial differentiation. “The structure of Chimeric Landscape is obviously a non-linear narrative,” he explained. “The one visual dominance that we encounter is the ink flow, it’s used as the symbol of the water, but water is reflected in a lot of the formations and the emerging qualities that I think are essential elements for everything—our bodies and the earth.”

This natural essence echoes throughout the work in the LACMA show, invoking atmospheres that range from the monumental to the microscopic. Whether constructing a cosmos out of ephemera or a simulacrum out of geographies, Chongbin places equal emphasis—equal importance—on his art and his viewer. He collaborates with both material and mind, allowing one to inform the other, ensuring that what lies above reflects below.

“Zheng Chongbin: Golden State” is on view in LACMA through January 4, 2026.

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