Dee Congdi Zhuang

Zhuang Congdi, based in Guangzhou, earned his BFA in Film and Video Art from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, and his MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London. Trained in digital media and conceptual construction, he has turned to abstract painting: a work arises not from a pre-set idea, but through the repeated tension between control and chance.

Western academic rigor gives him the concept; the Eastern Daoist idea of Wu Wei (無為)—action without forcing—lets him set the plan aside, meeting the material with bodily perception and painting alongside its resistance and accident. "Artist" is not a reliable profession to him, but an inescapable way of being, binding the work to how one lives, how one understands oneself, and the questions of meaning that may never be answered.

MFA, Fine Art, Goldsmiths, University of London

BFA, Film and Video Art, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing