Zheng Shengtian
Arts Academia/Research Visual Arts Person curator
Managing Editor at Yishu http://yishu-online.com/ - Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art
Shengtian Zheng was born in China and graduated from the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou. For more than thirty years he worked at his alma mater as Professor and Chair of the oil painting department. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota and at the San Diego State University before immigrating to Canada in 1990. In 1993, Zheng was elected as the Chairman of the Chinese Canadian Artists Federation in Vancouver. From 1996 to 2000, he was the Secretary of the Annie Wong Art Foundation and Director of Art Beatus Gallery. In 2002 he co-founded Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, which is the first English language magazine on contemporary Chinese art where he is the Managing Editor. He was a founding member of the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Centre A) and now sits as a Trustee of the Vancouver Art Gallery as well as the Asia Art Archive in North America. As an independent curator, he has organized and curated numerous exhibitions including Jiangnan – Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art Exhibitions (Vancouver, 1998), The Art of Proletarian Cultural Revolution (Vancouver, Toronto, Winnipeg, date), Shanghai Modern (Munich, Kiel, 2004), the Shanghai Biennale (Shanghai, 2004), China Trade (Vancouver, 2006), Reincarnation (Toronto, 2007) and Art and China’ Revolution (New York, 2008). He is currently the Senior Curator for Asia’s 2009 – 2011 Vancouver Biennale. Zheng is a frequent contributor to periodicals and catalogues of contemporary Chinese and Asian art. As an artist, his work has been exhibited in China, the United States and Canada since the 1960s.