Fang Lijun is one of the group identified as Cynical Realists, who felt alienated and dissatisfied by the spiritual that came hand in with the fast-paced development and commercialization of China in the late ’80s and ’90s. The Tiananmen Square uprising and massacre carried an especially poignant lesson. The artist has expressed his disillusionment in this regard :

　　A fool is someone still trusting after being taken in a hundred times. We’d rather be lost, bored, crisis-ridden misguided punks than be cheated. Don’t even consider trying the old methods on us, we’ll riddle your dogma with holes, then discard it in a rubbish heap. 1

　　Fang came of age in the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution, during which he watched his family endure denunciation and persecution. His family house was ransacked and marked by a defaming Red Guard slogan. He remembers the ambivalence and conflict of being caught up in the frenzy of a shouting session, only to realize that the target of a crowd he’d joined was his own beloved grandfather, wearing a humiliating placard and forced onto a stage. Fang’s coping mechanisms included joining the fray with well-received essays and numerous cartoons targeting Lin Biao and Confucius—criticisms made in the spirit of promoting Chinaman Mao.

　　By 1980, after the Cultural Revolution, Fang began academic training as an artist, first in Hebei and then in the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. His distinctive linage of an anxious baldheaded man first appeared in 1988. The following year, the events of Tiananmen Square unfolded. He recalled, “1 felt the same suspicions as when I was a kid. I felt doubts about the same things that had troubled me before.”2

　　While Fang’s work clearly responds to the events of his time, the artist reaches beyond the specificity of post-Tiananmen Square China. He expresses the basic emotions of people as individuals in mass society and, deliberately avoiding specific content, he considers the head and face as mediators of emotion. Fang's surreal paintings, struggling within a vast, indeterminate expanse that might be water or might be something more cosmic and infinite, the uneasy, baldheaded man (whether alone or surrounded by others) is accompanied only by loneliness and anxiety. The Chinese have a difficult-to-translate term, tian ren he yi, which refers to the unification of heaven and human—a kind of communion with the cosmos .Fang Lijun’s tremulous, solitary figures, who express ambivalence and discomfort within their stifling, airless surroundings, suggest autobiographical expressions of dissatisfaction with a world that alienates people from what should be a harmonious relationship with the universe.

　　1 Quoted Ben Davidson, “Cynical Realist Fang Lijun,” Beijing Scene 5, no.1 (1999), www.beijingscene.com .

　　2 Ibid

　　出处：《RADAR—Selections from the Collection of Vicki and Kent Logan》，2007，P88。