Fang Lijun began his career as a printmaker: he began to study woodcut making at the age of seventeen and, in 1985, entered the Print Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Following his graduation and until 1995, he turned almost exclusively to oil painting, earning international acclaim with his works in a sardonic style that came to be known as Cynical Realism. Artists working in this style expressed skepticism concerning the direction of society, a reaction common among China’s young intelligentsia in the wake of the June 1989 massacre of demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. Fang Lijun’s Cynical Realist paintings frequently feature shaven-headed rogues modeled on the artist and his friends. Of central interest in these works is the extreme alienation and ambiguity of the figures: set against a characterless ground, they are emotionally distant, with expressions either redolent of boredom or else indecipherable, possibly amused, possibly antagonistic.

　　In 1995 Fang Lijun returned to the woodcut, developing a brash and original approach. He carves his images into sheets of plywood, welcoming the interest that the randomly splintering upper layer gives to the lines he cuts into the wood. To create large horizontal images, he deploys the image across a contiguous group of vertical strips, as was sometimes done in sets of traditional Chinese paintings. Fang Lijun features the same subject matter in his prints as in his paintings--most often bald-headed men arrayed singly or in groups against a background of water or sky-but simplifies the imagery to suit the less nuanced medium, resulting in bold images where composition is of prime importance.

　　Fang Lijun’s work was the subject of the first solo show that the Japan Foundation held for a non-native artist. His paintings and prints appeared in the 1999 Venice Biennale.

　　出处：China On Ward——Chinese contemporary art, 1966—2006, Lousiana Museum of Modern Art, 2007, printed in demark, P.58.