Born in Roubaix. Lives and works in Bordeaux.

Hooked by painting overnight, Zong is what they called a self-educated. After a strong personal experiment, which has, according to him, deeply altered his mind, he decided to put into forms what he had felt during his psychic journey. The technique unfolded with the first painting in 2006, and hasn’t varied since, it has simply been refined: after a certain time of focusing, Zong directly applies painting on the canvas, without any preliminary design. After spreading painting all-over, without any special thought-process (what the artist calls “doing the matrix”), he begins to work on a specific pattern, whose inflection will determine after effects, as if “[he] was throwing some stones at the surface of a lake”. The paintings are done within a couple of hours. However, Zong is looking for refinement rather than brutality. Pigments are heavily watered down with linseed oil, in order to obtain something as sweet and smooth as possible. Thus, the artist gives us paintings so polished and accomplished to one may believe it is some king of CG made: he really wants us to feel smoothness despite the violence of the “movements” depicted.

Most of all, Zong aims at representing harmony, harmony within movement: movement of the paintbrush, rhythmic extension of his body; movement of the pattern, often a wave. Composition, frequently centripetal, leads to a “game of doors”: the vision is conducted one station after the other, each one them leading to multiple directions possible. The viewer’s attention departs from the center and gets hypnotized by circular movement itself. The artist’s goal is to play with light within patterns. Connections are what fascinate him: connections between parts of the canvas; between the viewer and the canvas; the viewer and the painter; between Nature’s components. To Zong, the work of art is made with “a single surge of energy” derived from Nature itself, a Nature represented in all its might. Canvas must be a testament of the beauty of this energy that link all things and beings in the Universe.

As a self-made painter, Zong has mostly been preserved from any direct pictorial influence. However, it is possible to link his work with Asian landscape painting’s tradition, the embodiment of this idea of synergy between expressionist depiction and nature’s drive, as well as the concept of energy-giving alliance between human beings and the Universe, between microcosm and macrocosm. Zong’s practice of painting resembles martial ars, as in Yan Pei-Ming’s. It is a ritual dance (Zong thanks his paintbrushes and his colors for the forthcoming journey, before actually making the painting), where “10 000 brushstrokes are given” in very short period of time. This propinquity with Eastern thinking was quickly acknowledged: Zong was exhibited in mainland China only months after his beginnings. Eventually, Zong is also a contemporary artist, developing a multimedia activity: painting, drawing, but also tattooing, installation, poetry, and soon perhaps staging… Zong presents a open-mindedness and a vast array of actions, that coincides with his vision of a world where everything is linked.

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