The baldheaded, a combination of numbness and craftiness, is the unique character in the paintings of Fang Lijun. The rebelling spirit and cynicism reflected by this unique lansign had made Fang Lijun so famous that he was regarded as the spokesman of “cynical realism”. However, this artist of “the third generation of New China” keeps far away from the hubbub, and lives a simple and happy life in a hovel in the suburb of Beijing. It is said that man is as what he draws. For instance, when you look at Fang Lijun sitting in front of me, you would be inclined to make a connection between the character he created and he himself. There are strong contrasts of colors in the paintings. In the paintings, he uses simple and bright contrasting hues or depressive dark grey to depict repetitiously these bald-headed portraits of himself and the friends around him, which gradually integrate the old Beijinger’s “hippie” image with his self-portrait. Dual Personality of Cynicism Look at him; he is sitting slackly on the bamboo chair in an unruly and raunchy manner. Smiling from ear to ear is the most friendly way of greeting. In front of him and his paintings, I have a feeling as if I’m not able to focus. You can not figure out what would come up in his mind and what would he do. The numb, foolish and crafty bald-head seems to reveal a repelling attitude towards the bitty culture. Fang Lijun lives in a house bought by himself in Tongxian County in the suburb of Beijing. The wood door leaf, bamboo shed, tea, flowers and plants, the crude and simple studio, all of these remind us of the quiet and leisure life in the age of farming. All these are totally different from his cynical attitude. Perhaps this this conflict status between detachment and persistence is just the dual personality Fang Lijun has tried to handle? Fang Lijun was born in Handan of Hebei Province in 1963. He graduated from the Print Department of Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1989. He belongs to the artist group of 1960s, which attracts the most attention and is also the most active in artistic creation nowadays. Generally speaking, the age of a painter is not necessarily related with his artistic creation. However, there is no doubt that the social change, the advancement of culture and age has also had great influence on their life experience and their way of expression. If classified into groups according to the historic phrases, Fang Lijun belongs to the third generation artists after the Cultural Revolution. The termination of Cultural Revolution was the background of the growth of the first generation artists. The introduction of the modern western trend into China was the background of the growth of the second generation artists. These two generations were idealists. Whatever they did, reflecting on the Cultural Revolution, or bringing in the western trend while recollecting their own culture, the only mission they had was to save the Chinese culture. On the contrary, the third generation was thrown into a society with ever-changing cultural values as early as when they were in primary school in the 1970s. Pointing at the Surrounding Mediocre Facts When this generation of artists entered the society in the 1989, the only thing that art and society had left for them were the shattered pieces. They no longer believed in the visional efforts in establishing new value system to save the society or the culture. What they could do was to save themselves through bravely facing the helplessness of life. In this way, fastidium was their truest feelings about the meaningless life. In the late 1980s, when they appeared frequently in the fields of art, literature, movie, pop music, among the others, and become a tide of fashion, some art critics called them the “scornful”, “cynical”, and “hippie” modernism. In the fine art community, Fang Lijun is a representative of Cynical Realism. November 19, 1993, New York Times used one of his paintings as its cover. This painting was named Yawning with his unique symbol-the hippie bareheaded in it. Fang Lijun pushed all the city youngsters who lost their belief and ridiculed the social regulations in the whirlpool of social change to the edge of slanting value system, and let them pop up from the cranny of the social order and let them tear up the veil of belief and ethics. With his poignant style of painting, he has drawn rolls of paintings, bringing depression and choking, as if a ubiquitous net hangs over the heads of all living things like foreordination, from which nobody is doomed to escape and has other choices. He said, “I cannot change this society; I can only depict our lives. Painting can help me get rid of the mood of solitude and embarrassment.” Therefore, his paintings are not only cynical to the society, but also show the puzzlement of survival values when ego fastidium comes to an extreme. Animadverting on the Mystery and Absurdity of Authority From this purport, Fang may be one of the most pessimistic contemporary painters in China. He uses pessimistic expressions with an intention of insisting a kind of “grass-root ” stand to animadvert on the mystery and absurdity of authority, and to expose the inside information of culture. This stand that reveals the ironic spirit among the folks is just the ironic personality of Fang, who build the new explanations of the world by himself through allegories. Fang’s creation styles changed to some extent after the year 1994. After then those people who dived into the bottom of the water lonely and who were in the swimming pool has became his latent words to people’s living status. Using quiet and flat blue waves and lonely images which occupied your line of sight intensively, instead of the chaos in the works of early the 1990, he made you cannot help feeling the despair and horror from the world of blue sky, white clouds and green waves behind them so that his works were classified into the part of expressing horrors and violence in the 4th Asian Art Show in Fukuoka, Japan during autumn 1994. Someone deems that it seems that the scenes he builds can better represent the spiritual world of himself and can better pump the inner fastidium, puzzlement and the absurdity of human being to the vagrant figure he chooses; so his works accordingly become an important side wing of the cultural scenes in this era full of ambiguities. For the contemporary Chinese painting circle, Fang is neither in the so-called mainstream center nor on the edge of the mainstream; instead, he is in the place where he is, an isolated place in distant suburb of Beijing, the capital city and also in his mental vagrancy. There is no exposition of excessive materials of this chaotic world nor the pollution of industrial civilization, only tools, desks and chairs, easels, palette, teapots and an empty house indoor scene, which already reveal clearly that although the man is in his isolated living place, his spirit is always in another location—the world where leisure and spree coexist and quiet cultivation and vagrancy to strange places are compatible.

作者：Feng,Boyi