Zeng Fanzhi was born in in Wuhan, Hubei, China in 1964. He graduated in oil Painting from Hubei Fine Arts Institute in 1991. In 1993 Zeng Fanzhi moved to Beijing. During the 1990’s he used a  bleak expressionist style to paint hospital scenes with sadistic doctors and defenceless patients. The theme relates to his experience and feelings he developed by growing up next to a hospital which he recurrently visited. He is most known for his Mask series, where his figures are always wearing a mask, but nevertheless retain highly expressive facials features. This series explore the distrust, jealousy, concealment and deception between people of modern society; though the motif of the mask, Zeng Fanzhi alludes to the inability to adapt to modern society, exploring what happens to the human being in Contemporary China, where change is inevitable.  He is one of the few contemporary artists to have had a retrospective solo show at the Shangai Art Museum (2003).