In 2011, at the same auction venue another canvas of Zeng Fanzhi's, "The Leopard," painted in 2010, was also newsworthy. This was a charity auction, and all proceeds benefited The Nature Conservancy. Even Christies donated their own cut to the nonprofit.
According to the article in Artdaly---
.On a monumental canvas standing nearly three meters tall, Zeng presents a solitary and ill lit leopard, moving cautiously through a dark forest. The foreground of the composition is dense with Zeng Fanzhi‟s characteristically expressive brushwork, depicting a thicket of dry, lifeless branches with no order other than the insinuated drive to envelope the protagonist. The depth of the landscape is delineated by mysterious flairs of white and the powdery blue snow embankment. The leopard is shown passing over this ridge, against an infinite black sky, peppered with flakes of snow, behind him. The surface of the canvas is built up through a range of brushstrokes ranging from the broadly expressive to the truncated, calligraphic branches, and the soft inviting texture of the animal.
Some areas of the composition seem deliberately blurred, as an audience‟s vision would be in trying to gaze through a snowstorm. The handling of the leopard is particularly evocative, highlighting the soft subtle beauty of its coat, varying from white to ochre to soft amber, speckled with its black spots and the snow gathering on its back. Its gaze is almost shockingly human. A viewer, who knows Zeng's practice, becomes aware that the artist has afforded the animal a greater humanity than his human figure-based paintings.
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