Zheng Shengtian is a Chinese-Canadian scholar, curator, and artist born in Henan, China, and currently based in Vancouver. He previously served as the Chair of the Oil Painting Department at the Hangzhou Academy of Art (now China Academy of Art) and as a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota and San Diego State University. He is the Secretary-General of the Liang Jiehua Art Foundation, President and advisor of the Vancouver Chinese Artists Association, and founding director of the Vancouver Contemporary Asian Art Center. Since 2002, he has been the general editor of the English edition of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. Zheng also holds positions as a board member of the Vancouver Art Gallery, chairman of the Canada-China Contemporary Art Advancement Association, trustee of the Asian Art Documentation Library in the United States, and editor of Art and Contemporary.

He has curated numerous significant events and exhibitions, including the Jiangnan: Modern and Contemporary Art from South of the Yangzi River series (Vancouver), Shanghai Modern (Munich), 2004 Shanghai Biennale, Art and China’s Revolution (New York), Yishu Award for Contemporary Art Criticism forum (Xi’an), and Yellow Signal: New Media from China series(Vancouver). He is currently a senior curator for the Vancouver Biennale and was awarded the Curatorial Lifetime Achievement Award (2012).

Zheng is also a columnist for Yishu and frequently publishes contemporary art writings in both Chinese and international publications. In 2013, China Academy of Art Press published a four-volume collection of his essays titled The Art Collection of Zheng Shengtian. He is also an artist, and since the 1960s, his works have been exhibited in China, the United States, Canada, Russia, and other countries. In 2013, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Canada.

In 2001, Zheng and Lu Jie wrote to the then Vice President of the China Academy of Art, Xu Jiang, proposing the establishment of the first art curator training course for the Chinese region at the China Academy of Art to cultivate professional art planning talents. The Curator Training Program was submitted, and in 2003, China Academy of Art established the Visual Culture Research Center, the predecessor of ICAST. From 2015 to 2021, ICAST and the Long March Project co-founded the curatorial project Proposal for the Sheng Project, which aimed to explore and understand Chinese art in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary eras through an in-depth study of Zheng Shengtian’s artistic encounters and life experiences spanning over half a century. Zheng participated in curatorial workshops held as part of this project in 2015 and 2016.