Zheng Chongbin was educated as a classical Chinese figurative painter at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, where he taught for four years after his graduation in 1984. Acclaimed as one of China’s preeminent young experimental ink painters in the 1980s, he mounted his first solo exhibition at the Shanghai Museum of Art in 1988. In 1989, he received a fellowship from the San Francisco Art Institute to study installation, performance, and conceptual art, receiving his MFA in 1991. A resident of the San Francisco Bay Area for over three decades, Zheng is inspired by the region's distinctive atmospheric and environmental effects and rich ecologies, as well as by the California light and space movement. He has exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Hong Kong Museum of Art; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Chambers Fine Art Gallery, New York; UOB Art Gallery/West Bund Art Center, Shanghai; Ink Studio, Beijing; Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York; Orange County Museum of Art, California; and more.
Zheng’s work can be found in the collections, among others, of the British Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Chicago Art Institute, the Orange County Museum of Art in California, M+ in Hong Kong, the Daimler Art Collection in Stuttgart, Germany, the DSL Collection in France, and the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. Zheng is the subject of a documentary film, "The Enduring Passion of Ink," and an in-depth monograph, "Zheng Chongbin: Impulse, Matter, Form," edited by Britta Erickson and distributed by D.A.P. in the United States.