On May 15, 2025, Asia Society Seattle will host the second in our three-part series called SAM Talks: Seattle Speaker Series. The Series is designed and dedicated to promoting understanding of Asia and the Asia diaspora. 

The third speaker in our series is Zheng Chongbin, a preeminent experimental ink painter whose work is held in major collections worldwide. Zheng Chongbin (b. 1961, Shanghai) has spent over three decades blending classical Chinese ink traditions with Western abstraction, exploring concepts of matter, energy, and change rooted in Daoist thought. His paintings, created through the interaction of ink, acrylic, water, and paper, capture the dynamic processes underlying natural structures and the emergence and dissolution of order. In addition to painting, Zheng has expanded into multi-media installations and video art, exploring natural processes on both microscopic and macroscopic scales. Educated at the China Academy of Art and the San Francisco Art Institute, Zheng has lived in the Bay Area for over 30 years, drawing inspiration from its unique ecology.

On May 15, 2025, Zheng Chongbin will also be joined by special musical performer Daniel Pak! Daniel is a singer, songwriter, and producer born and raised in Hawai'i and living locally in Seattle. Daniel also began a nonprofit creative youth development organization in 2010 that has supported over 7,000 aspiring young recording artists in the greater Seattle area. Join Asia Society Seattle in this upbeat celebration of visual and musical arts.

This speaker series is a collaboration between Asia Society Seattle and Seattle Asian Art Museum. 

Tickets are available now! Tickets are $25 for nonmembers/$10 for members.  Become a member today! Each ticket includes complimentary, after-hours access to the Seattle Asian Art Museum galleries!

Press must email [email protected] for registration.

Speaker Bios

Throughout his career of three decades, Zheng Chongbin (b. 1961, Shanghai) has held the classical Chinese ink tradition and Western pictorial abstraction in productive mutual tension. Systematically exploring and deconstructing their conventions and constituents—figure, texture, space, geometry, gesture, materiality—he has developed a distinctive body of work that makes the vitality of matter directly perceptible. Central to Zheng’s art is the notion of the world as always in flux, consisting of flows of matter and energy that repeatedly cohered and dissipated. Inherent in pre-modern Chinese and especially Daoist thought, this worldview enables contemporary inquiries into complex systems like climate and social behavior, artificial intelligence, and quantum physics. Through the interactions of ink, acrylic, water, and paper, Zheng’s paintings generate and record the processes that underlie the emergence of order (including organic life and human consciousness) and its inevitable dissipation. His paintings thus resemble natural structures ranging from neurons, blood vessels, and tree branches to mountains, rivers, and coastlines, but by instantiating their formation rather than by objective depiction.

Maintaining his work with painting, Zheng Chongbin synergistically has integrated his multi- media based exploration throughout his installation and video projects. His landmark light-and-space installation Wall of Skies (2015) consists of a complex folded structure fully enclosed by a tilted ceiling and slanted walls, creating a delicate interplay of nonparallel lines and planes. Resolving neither into painting, nor sculpture, nor pure light and space, it insists on its material presence even as its objecthood is dissolved in a spatial experience. The latest example includes his major site-specific installation Liquid Space (2019-) in the landmark Zen Temple Ryosoku-in / Kenninji in Kyoto Japan. In his video installations, Zheng represents processes of nature—from molecular and cellular to topographical and climatic—in the scale of human perception through microscopic and macroscopic imagery and accompanying soundscapes, unfolding these processes spatially and temporally.

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 graduation in 1984. Acclaimed as one of China’s preeminent young experimental ink painters in the 1980's, 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.

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.

Born and raised on the island of O`ahu, Daniel Pak is a singer, songwriter, and producer making his home in Seattle, Washington. As frontman for Kore Ionz (2008-2017), Pak shared the stage with reggae royalty, including The Wailers, Steel Pulse, and Toots and the Maytals. In 2011, “Love You Better,” his “poignant love letter,” as The International Examiner calls it, rose to #1 on commercial radio in Hawai`i.

Performing as a solo artist since 2018, Pak has shared the stage with Stone Gossard (Pearl Jam) and Sir Mix-a-Lot and is currently working on new music with producers Eric Lilavois, Steve Fisk, and Masa Fukudome. Pak has performed at events for Washington State Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal and King County Executive Dow Constantine. In July 2024, Pak headlined Downtown Sounds in Bellingham with his band, The Lolos, to an audience of over 5,000.

Pak is co-founder and executive director of Totem Star, a nonprofit creative youth development organization started in 2010 that has supported over 7,000 aspiring young recording artists in the greater Seattle area through music production, live performance, and mentorship. Partnering with the City of Seattle and the Cultural Space Agency, Pak led Totem Star’s effort to raise $2.2M to build a 2,000 sq ft state-of-the-art recording studio in historic Seattle landmark King Street Station, which opened in November 2023.

Pak has served as Co-Chair of the Seattle Music Commission, as a Governor for the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the Recording Academy, and as a Trustee for The Bush School. In November 2022 he was inducted into the Asian Hall of Fame alongside Hiro Yamamoto (Soundgarden) and Artist Ambassador Krist Novoselic (Nirvana).

Trila Bumstead is the Owner of ‘Ohana Media Group, LLC & ‘Ohana Digital Services. A proud graduate of the University of Washington with a BA in Accounting. Graduate of the NABEF class of 2004. Serves as an associate dean for that same program since 2012. Employed as an Audit Manager for Deloitte & Touché (1994 to 1999). Joined New Northwest Broadcasters (“NNB”) as its Chief Financial Officer in Feb 1999.  During a 13 year tenure with NNB served as CFO, Executive VP and President & CEO.

Founded Ohana Media Group, LLC (“OMG”) in 2011.  Purchased stations in Alaska, Washington and Oregon.  Today OMG consists of 11 radio stations. Honored as Oregon’s Broadcaster of the Year 2022. Recipient of Media Financial Managers Rainmaker Award (2009). Voted one of Radio Ink’s Most Influential Women (June 2010 & June 2016). Oregon Association of Broadcasters board member (2012-2020). OAB Chairwoman 2017-2019. Currently  OAB’s ex-officio Treasurer. NAB Radio board June 2017-June 2022 and served on NAB’s audit, real estate and diversity sub-committees.

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