By his third year of art school, he had completed 45 works. None of them fit the official style, but a teacher, Pi Daojian, encouraged him to mount a solo show.
到了美院的第三年，他已经完成了45件作品。它们都不符合官方风格，但一位名叫皮道坚的老师鼓励他举行个展。
He had depicted the down and out. (Three of them appear in his current show.) One figure in a red shirt sits in a twisted pose, asleep, a jagged red line down the side of his face. Another painting shows four sleepy shoeshine men waiting for work.
他描绘失意落魄的人（其中三幅作品出现在目前的这个展览中）。一个穿红色衬衫的人以扭曲的姿势坐着睡着了，他脸颊的一侧有一条锯齿状的红线。还有一幅画上，四个昏昏欲睡的擦鞋匠正在等活干。
“He painted what he saw,” Mr. Pi said during a recent reunion with Mr. Zeng in Wuhan and a meal that featured black tofu, frog legs and chopped duck necks. “He found his own way to express emotion.”
“他画下他所看到的，”皮道坚最近在武汉与曾梵志重聚时说，他们一起吃了一顿饭，点了臭豆腐、田鸡和切成段的鸭脖子。“他发现了自己的表达情感的方式。”
Local propaganda officials pounced. “I was called to the exhibition place,” Mr. Zeng said. “I was panicked.” They grilled him.
当地宣传官员没有放过他。“他们叫把我叫到那个展览的地方，”曾梵志说。“那时候我很害怕。”官员们质问他。
“‘What is the meaning of your paintings? Are you trying to make a political statement? Is this blood on his face?’ they asked,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Yes, it’s blood, but it doesn’t mean anything.’ They asked why are these people looking so sullen.”
“‘你画这个是什么意思，你是要表达什么政治立场吗？他脸上这个是血吗？’他们问，”他回忆说。“我说，‘是，这是血，但是它不代表什么特别意思啊。’他们还问我为什么这些人看起来那么阴沉。”
The exhibition was closed to the public; only art students were allowed.
于是展览不再对外开放；只有艺术学生被允许参观。
Undeterred, he painted an even more raw series of works that showed the anguish of patients at the hands of callous doctors at a public hospital in his neighborhood. Then he zeroed in on the nearby butcher’s shop and its huge slabs of frozen meat. One canvas, smothered in the red and pink of raw meat, showed the butcher and his family taking an afternoon nap atop a thinly covered carcass.
曾梵志没有被吓倒，而是创作了一个更加真实的系列，展现自己家附近一座公立医院中，患者在铁石心肠的医生手中忍受痛苦。然后他把目光对准附近的肉联厂，以及里面那些巨大的冷冻肉块。一幅画上，红色与粉红色的生肉厚厚地堆着，屠宰工人和家人在只有薄薄一层遮盖的尸体上睡午觉。
The boldness of the paintings impressed an influential art critic, Li Xianting. Emboldened by his support, Mr. Zeng left for Beijing.
他的大胆风格打动了有影响力的评论家栗宪庭。在他的支持鼓励之下，曾梵志移居北京。
There, he shunned the dirt-floor artists’ colony on the city outskirts, and shrewdly chose a tiny, leaky apartment in the upscale embassy district.
在那里，他避开了城郊脏兮兮的艺术家聚居地，精明地在高档的使馆区选择了一个破破烂烂的小公寓。
By then, the government was encouraging people to get rich. But there was an undercurrent of unease born from the government-ordered Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. He began painting what became a signature theme: portraits of men and women, sometimes in groups, sometimes alone, all wearing masks. They were almost always grinning with exaggerated smiles, but underneath lay feelings of angst.
当时，政府正鼓励人们致富。但是1989年政府在天安门广场的屠杀带来了一种不安的潜在情绪。那段时间曾梵志以男人和女人的肖像为主题进行创作，他们有时成群结队，有时孤独一人，脸上都戴着面具，后来这个主题成了他的标志。这些人面孔上几乎总是带着夸张的微笑，但其下掩饰着焦虑的情绪。
Word spread. By 1993 he had held his first solo show in Hong Kong. In 1998, an art curator in Beijing, Karen Smith, introduced him to Lorenz Helbling, a Swiss citizen, who became the most influential Western dealer in China and has represented Mr. Zeng ever since.
他的名声不胫而走。1993年，他在香港举行了第一次个展。1998年，身在北京的艺术策展人凯伦•史密斯(Karen Smith)将他介绍给瑞士人何浦林(Lorenz Helbling)，后者成为中国最有影响力的西方艺术交易商，从那以后一直为曾梵志担任代理。
In one of his first sales, Mr. Helbling sold a Zeng painting of eight young Chinese men and women wearing masks to an American tourist for $16,000. Ten years later, the painting sold at a Hong Kong auction for $9.7 million, making Mr. Zeng the most expensive contemporary Chinese artist, a position he retains unchallenged.
何浦林卖出的第一批作品中有一幅画，上面是八个戴着面具的中国年轻男女。何浦林将它以1.6万美元的价格卖给了一位美国游客。十年后，这幅画在香港的一次拍卖会上以970万美元的价格售出，使曾梵志成为作品售价最昂贵的当代中国艺术家，这个位置至今未曾受到挑战。
In time, Mr. Helbling arranged the big break: an introduction to Mr. Pinault.
何浦林抓住时机，促成了一次重大突破：他把皮诺介绍给了曾梵志。
“Pinault had been saying he wanted to come and see my works,” Mr. Zeng recalled. “I drove myself, and on the way there was a car accident. I kept Pinault waiting for three hours. People were calling me and yelling: ‘Where are you?’ I nearly screwed the whole thing up.”
“皮诺先生说过他想要来看我作品，”曾梵志回忆。“那天我自己开车，然后路上正好有个车祸，皮诺等了我足足三个小时。别人一直给我打电话问我‘你到哪了’，我差点就搞砸了。”
During the visit, Mr. Pinault bought two canvases and wanted to buy more. “Actually,” Mr. Zeng said, “I told him: ‘I was only going to sell you one. But since I am late I will sell you two.’”
那一次皮诺买了曾梵志的两幅画，他还想买更多。“其实，”曾梵志说，“那时候我和他说，‘我本来只打算卖给你一幅画，但既然我迟到了，我就卖给你两幅吧。’”
Mr. Zeng’s works have been shown in two historic palazzos in Venice that Mr. Pinault restored as venues for his huge art collection. The fact that Mr. Pinault owns one of his favorite paintings, a portrait of the artist Lucian Freud, and displays it so prominently in his Belgravia home in London in a $100,000 18th-century frame, seems to give Mr. Zeng the most pleasure.
皮诺修复了威尼斯两座历史悠久的宫殿，用来容纳自己庞大的艺术收藏，曾梵志的作品也曾在那里展出。皮诺拥有曾梵志本人最喜欢的作品之一——艺术家卢西安•弗洛伊德(Lucian Freud)的肖像，并将它用一个价值10万美元的18世纪画框装起来，醒目地挂在自己伦敦贝尔格莱维亚的家中，这似乎是最让曾梵志开心的。
“I asked him many times to borrow the Lucian Freud for one of my shows, and he always said no,” Mr. Zeng said. As a gesture of their friendship — they hang out together in Europe, Mr. Zeng said — Mr. Pinault agreed to send it to Beijing for the show.
“我问过他很多次要借这幅弗洛伊德，但是他一直说不行，”曾梵志说。作为友谊的表示——他说两人在欧洲时会聚一聚——皮诺才同意把它送到北京参加这次展出。
There was a reason for the reluctance. Mr. Zeng said, “They had to close off the street in London and get a crane to take it out of his front window.”
他犹豫是有原因的。曾梵志说：“他们还要把伦敦的路给封了，然后用一台吊车从窗户把画吊出来。”