Zeng Fanzhi’s art offers an implicit critique of the collectivist era in China during which he came of age, interrogating the tension between an individual’s inner life and the public face one presents to society. In 1993, at 30 years old, Zeng moved from his hometown of Wuhan to the metropolis of Beijing, prompting a corresponding shift in his artwork, which showed a growing interest in depicting highly-pressured urban lifestyles.

This work belongs to his famed Mask series, which began in 1994 and explored the existential crisis that faced the Chinese people adapting to dramatic urbanization and commercialization near the turn of the century. Zeng directs our attention to his subject’s clothing—the “trappings” of identity that render their wearers strikingly similar, even as they purport to differentiate. The works in this series simultaneously give voice to a specific cultural consciousness, and express universal themes about human experience: the face-off between society and individuals, and the impossibility of knowing another’s true nature.