FANG LIJUN

　　Born 1963

　　1989 Graduate of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing Lives and works in Beijing

　　CYNICISM AND KITSCH

　　Fang Lijun grew up in the industrial city of Handan south of Beijing During the Cultural Revolution, his family was labeled as “rich peasants.” To spare him from bullying, Fang's father chose to home-school him and taught him how to paint. In 1989, together with Wang Guangyi and Zhang Xiaogang, Fang was selected for the China/Avant-Garde exhibition at the National Gallery in Beijing, which the Ministry of Culture shut down the same day it opened. Over the last decade, he has become one of the most famous and successful artists in China.

　　Fang works in a realistic painting style with a hint of kitsch heightened by a vivid palette. Early in his career, Fang became a leading exponent of the Cynical Realism movement, alongside Yue Minjun, Yang Shaobin and others. The cynical focus is most pronounced in his famous portraits of the identical bald figures that he developed into his trademark in the 1990s.Today, he explores new stylistic expressions and subjects, including swarms of butterflies, bees and tiny flies rendered down to the smallest detail. In his painting 2009, No 4 (2009), inspired by the pre-Raphaelite school, tiny insects and butterflies have spun a pupa-like web of thin ropes and hair around a human figure. Like a butterfly’s metamorphosis from larva to pupa and butterfly, the painting can be regarded as a metaphor for a person’s metamorphosis to a new stage in life.

　　DREAMSCAPE

　　In 2009, No.5 (2009) a gigantic fly with a small child on its back soars above the clouds with a view of jagged, snow-clad mountains. In the background, other birds and insects are seen, likewise carrying small children on their backs, though these children are naked and look less content, As an image of childish innocence and imagination, the first child appears to be enjoying its fanciful flight over a sweeping landscape. Moreover, the painting contains obvious parallels to classic Chinese landscape painting which ascribed to landscape an equally sublime and poetic power Generally ambiguous, Fang’s works exist in the gray zone between dream and nightmare, idyll and tragedy life and death.

　　出处：《CHINAMANIA》, ARKEN MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, P21.