Artwork Description

Title:Missing Person Notice

Artist
Zhu Fadong

Date
2012

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions
57.5 x 39.4 in (146 x 100 cm)

1. Artwork Identification
Zhu Fadong’s Missing Person Notice (2012) is a haunting oil on canvas portrait that merges figuration with political symbolism. Rendered in a monochrome palette of greys and blacks, the painting features the close-up face of an anonymous individual, sculpted with thick, impasto brushwork. Floating above the figure’s forehead is a stark red silhouette of the Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tiananmen), a powerful icon of political authority in China. This confrontation between the human visage and the state symbol is central to the work’s psychological and ideological intensity.

2. Artistic Style and Influences
Zhu’s painterly language draws upon Expressionism and political realism, blending raw gestural brushwork with conceptual intent. The facial form is fragmented and textural, suggestive of trauma, displacement, or erasure. By juxtaposing the sacred imagery of state architecture atop an unnamed human face, Zhu invokes the visual rhetoric of propaganda while simultaneously subverting it. The result is a charged image that evokes both empathy and unease, aligning Zhu’s practice with the broader Chinese avant-garde of the 1990s and 2000s.

3. Historical Context
Created in 2012, Missing Person Notice reflects Zhu Fadong’s continued engagement with themes of identity, loss, and state control. His landmark 1994 performance This Person is for Sale positioned him as one of China’s leading voices on the plight of rural migrant workers during the Reform Era. This later painting extends those concerns, gesturing toward the erasure of individuality amid mass migration, surveillance, and ideological conformity. The red Tiananmen motif adds a chilling resonance, evoking both national pride and collective silence around moments of historical rupture.

4. Provenance
Provenance documentation can be provided upon contact.

5. Condition and Conservation
The artwork is in very good condition. The paint surface is intact and stable, with no observed areas of loss, cracking, or restoration. The canvas maintains its structural integrity, and the impasto areas retain their intended dimensional quality.

6. Artistic Significance
Missing Person Notice is a powerful and deeply resonant work in Zhu Fadong’s oeuvre, exemplifying his lifelong interrogation of China’s socio-political transformations. Through the fusion of portraiture and symbolism, Zhu distills a complex psychological narrative that speaks to the invisibility and dispossession experienced by countless individuals during China’s economic rise. This piece holds strong significance within the canon of contemporary Chinese conceptual painting, making it a compelling acquisition for institutions and collectors engaged with politically engaged art from the Global East.