Fang Lijun

Biography

At the end of 2003, in a room of the Kunsthalle Mannheim with portrait sculptures by Maillol and Rodin, light boxes by Jeff Wall and paintings by Alex Katz, seven scrolls with an overall size of 400 by 854 centimetres were hung. It was a woodcut by Fang Lijun. At first it was called “SARS”, later “Untitled”. The museum's director, Rolf Lauter, wrote in the accompanying text about the growing “de-individualisation” of people and about the danger the virus posed to Chinese crowds. Mannheim was unable to buy the work at the time. Today versions of it belong to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou.

Fang Lijun was born in 1963 in Handan, in Hebei province, and his childhood fell in the years of the Cultural Revolution. In 1980, as the country began to open up, he entered a secondary art school and took up realist technique in earnest; his models were the works of the “educated youth”, which showed that art could differ from what was prescribed from above. By some accounts he studied ceramics for a time at the Hebei Light Industry School. In 1985 he entered the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. This was the time of the '85 New Wave, when Chinese artists read Western philosophy avidly and took in Western contemporary art. Fang himself later said that books did not influence him much, but a sense of the value of the individual human life stayed with him. In 1989 he graduated from the academy's printmaking department, and his diploma work, it is reported, was done in oil.

In February 1989 his works were shown at the “China/Avant-Garde” exhibition at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. At first its opening was not permitted, and for artists of that circle it became a turning point.

He began the “Bald Heads” series in 1988. Young men with shaven heads yawn, smile, swim, and again and again their faces wear the same frozen, slightly foolish grin. Fang explained that through these figures he was speaking about the lives of artists: in China a shaven-headed man looks like a simpleton, and he wanted people to be judged by their moral character rather than their appearance. Critics read in his heroes the bewilderment of young people after 1989; some saw them as monks looking inward. Over time the compositions grew more complex: one large figure in front, small ones behind it, the connection between them unclear, the background receding. Water appears in his work constantly, most often as a man swimming or drowning. The artist himself said that water helps him speak about Chinese society and about the position of a person who has no voice.

In 1991 a joint exhibition of Fang Lijun and Liu Wei took place in Beijing; it is considered the first exhibition of “Cynical Realism”. In July of the same year the two of them, together with Song Yonghong, took part in the “New Generation” exhibition at the Museum of Chinese History. At the beginning of 1992 Fang moved to the Yuanmingyuan village in north-western Beijing, where artists were trying to build a kind of utopia of their own and lived hard, selling work to pay for paint. Back after his first oil paintings he had put it this way: let their generation be called losers and nobodies, so long as nobody deceives them any more. To my mind, this phrase explains his irony more precisely than any art-historical definition.

He did not give up woodcut even after turning to painting. He cuts the negative into the block, applies the ink and prints on paper, joining several blocks and scrolls into a single composition. In the woodcut “1991.6.1”, assembled from five fabric scrolls about five by six metres, a grey crowd of shaven-headed people stretches upwards towards a sky with clouds, where the finger of a huge head in the foreground is pointing.

International exhibitions followed. In 1996 he was shown by the Japan Foundation Asia Center in Tokyo, in 1998 his works were at the Asia Society in New York, and in 1999 he took part in the main exhibition of the 48th Venice Biennale. In 2002 the Ludwig Forum in Aachen held an exhibition of his prints and paintings from 1989–2002, in 2005 there was an exhibition at the National Art Museum of China, and in 2006 at the Kupferstichkabinett of the Berlin State Museums. His works were also shown by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in its new acquisitions programme and by the Centre Pompidou in the exhibition “Alors, la Chine?”. On 14 August 2013 Fang Lijun was invited to head the contemporary art research centre of the China National Academy of Painting. In 2016 he took part in the exhibition “Chinese Whispers” at the Kunstmuseum Bern.