Feng Zhengjie

Feng Zhengjie, whose work appears on the cover of 2005's China: The New Contemporary Painting, represents international trends toward borrowing and riffing on bygone styles--and the return to painterly technique--as much as he does his country's blooming contemporary art scene. His sources include posters of Shanghai in the 1930s and contemporary wedding photography, and the bright, streamlined style with which he addresses their conventions has the look of polished fashion imagery, an airbrushed 1980s feeling that's gotten increasingly eerie in recent years as his subjects' irises and pupils have shrunk to little dots on largely white eyes, giving them a glassy, doll-like look. Eleonora Battiston writes, "Their eyes change and follow the artist's transformations...year by year, with different thoughts, looking towards and within his country's history and culture."