Servers weaved between guests to offer delicate canapés, and champagne glasses clinked to sing joyous tunes…inside Hauser & Wirth’s new gallery space in Central, the crowd was abuzz with anticipation as contemporary artist Zhang Enli prepared to unveil “Faces”, his inaugural exhibition in Hong Kong. 

Minutes before the show opened to the media, Zhang pushed open the tall glass doors of the gallery. Wearing his signature black beanie and red shirt for good luck (according to feng shui), he looked at both sides of the street before disappearing around the busy Queen’s Road Central corner for a smoke break.

They say that artists have their eureka moments during smoke breaks like these — and indeed, it is during Zhang’s brief respites from creation that he weaves together the titles of his paintings, all of which come after his pieces are complete.

On a monumental canvas, loose mediated traces float above thin layers of sangria, cyan and muted swashes of paint. Uneven lines swirl across the surface surrounded by loose strokes seemingly squiggled around. In Zhang Enli’s eyes, this painting captures “A Guest From Afar”. 

People may think that Zhang is painting portraits of the world, but to the artist, everything in this world is a portrait in itself.

Spanning more than three decades, Zhang’s practice can be divided into four main periods: Emotionally charged figure paintings in the 1990s, nuanced still life of quotidian objects in the early 2000s, “space paintings” in the mid-2000s, and gestural portraits beginning in the early 2010s. Honing in on the use of colours, brushstrokes and their interplay, Zhang has arrived at his conceptual portrait style featuring loose and free brushwork. 

To say that Zhang transitioned from figurative painting to abstract would be an oversimplification of his philosophy towards art because he believes that there is no clear distinction between the two genres. But, his arrival at this understanding didn’t come overnight. 

When Zhang began painting as a young man in Shanghai three decades earlier, information dissemination was limited which meant that his understanding of the world was too. He didn’t study at an art academy nor graduate with a degree in art history. In the late 1980s, Zhang would spend months on a painting for a chance to be exhibited in group exhibitions, which occurred once a year or perhaps two. 

In a conversation with art critic and curator Mr Li Xu, Zhang reveals that “all these things derived from a special way of thinking that was characterised to a special period of time. Later works are based on and develop from the works of the 1990s.”