庄丛棣，现居广州。本科毕业于中央美术学院影像艺术专业，后于伦敦大学金史密斯学院获得纯艺术硕士学位。在取得两个看起来还算体面的学位后，他却对当代艺术的现状感到失望，并停止创作，转而做了两年半的A-Level艺术教师。

硕士毕业四年多以后，他发现不做艺术并没有让人生变得更容易理解，于是重新开始工作。这一次，他离开了此前以数字媒介和观念建构为主的实践，转向绘画，用抽象画探索一种以身体感知和材料的物质抵抗为基础的创作程序：一幅画并非来自预先设定的构想，而是在控制与偶然的反复拉扯中逐渐形成。（他另外还有一个涉及欲望与文化图像的秘密项目！）

对他而言，“艺术家”并不是一个特别可靠的职业身份——因为他还没用这个标签赚到哪怕一分钱——而更像是一种无法彻底摆脱的存在方式：将创作与如何生活、如何理解自身，以及人生究竟有什么意义之类不太可能得到答案的问题捆绑在一起。

Dee Congdi Zhuang lives and works in Guangzhou. He received a BA in Video Art from the Central Academy of Fine Arts and an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London. Having acquired two reasonably respectable degrees, he became disillusioned with the state of contemporary art, stopped making work altogether, and spent the next two and a half years teaching A-Level Fine Art.

More than four years after completing his MFA, he discovered that not making art had done very little to make life any less confusing, so he returned to it. Moving away from his earlier practice in digital media and conceptual production, he turned to painting. His current abstract work explores a working process grounded in bodily perception and material resistance. Rather than beginning with a predetermined image, each painting takes shape through an extended negotiation between control and accident. (He is also quietly working on a secret project involving desire and cultural imagery. )

For Dee, “artist” has never proved to be a particularly dependable profession—he has yet to earn a single penny from the title. It is better understood as a condition he has been unable to shake: a way of tying artistic practice to the equally impractical questions of how to live, how to understand oneself, and what, if anything, a human life is supposed to mean.