Shape, form, and figure are the fundamentals when Zeng Hong conceives a painting. Whereas the narrative in the composition becomes the hidden plot point, emerging as an embodied expression. How the legacy of modernism accounts for paintings here and now in the current situation is the field of focus. In the work exhibited, “Shape – People,” the artist repeats the painting language to portray a common word in reality, “people,” they are every day, but quite literally often alive at every moment. A stroke forms a line on the canvas, and a brushstroke builds and shapes a line. The sense of the word is consumed in confusion and shaping but is clarified each time the figure revives.