The emerald green lawn appears fresh on a crisp fall day. “It’s not real,” he said sheepishly. Fastidious about things being neat, he grew weary of Beijing’s messy brown grass.

From his early days as a poor art student in Wuhan, a gritty city along the Yangtze River, he caught the attention of teachers and critics who admired his rebellion against the standard fare of Communist-approved social realism.

“The head of the library at my school said if I wanted to see better art books, I should go to the library in Zhejiang Province,” he said of the austere days in the mid-1980s. “I took a leave and traveled three days and nights by train to Shanghai, and then another three hours to Hangzhou.” There, and later at the art institute in Wuhan, he discovered the German artist Max Beckmann and admired the work of Willem de Kooning.

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.

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.

“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.”