Fang Lijun has been the leading protagonist of Cynical Realism since the late eighties. The 1980s were characterized by great idealism and hope in the avant-garde artistic community, hope that the artists would be able to contribute to the regeneration of Chinese culture. The exhibition of their works at the China National Gallery was the culmination of that decade and signaled to the artists that they had been recognized.

　　One of the most famous images of cotemporary Chinese art is the Fang Lijun painting which shows a main figure, a friend of the artist, who might be yawning or yelling with the mute, figures in the background. The contrast between the strong individuality of the main figure and the dazed conformity of the four background figures is overwhelming. The bald headed youth which first appeared in the artists paintings in the early 1990s has become Fang Lijun's characteristic figure. Later series include the water series, dreamlike works of swimmers, and gigantic, multi-panel, woodblock prints.

　　Fang Lijun's works have been in virtually every significant exhibition of contemporary Chinese art since the early 1990s. One of his works has become almost synonymous with cynical realism, at least in the West. Its extreme close-up of a bald male head, caught in an expression hovering between a huge yawn and a grimace of pain, with a row of blueish-grey, identically-clad figures behind him, set against a deep-blue back-ground, combines all the decisive elements in Fang Lijun's work of the early to mid-nineties: The isolated figures, very close to the picture-plane, not communicating, are startling in their mixture of ennui and exasperation.

　　Fang Lijun was a graphic artist before he became a painter. He graduated from the Department of Prints of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1989. He is an extremely skillful wood-cut artist, handling the medium with the ease that comes naturally to someone who spent years practicing the graphic arts. Practicing diligently, but not always with a lot of enthusiasm, as Fang recalls, which led to his ventures into oil painting. Fang Lijun now alternates between both media, putting a lot of energy and expertise into the huge wood cuts as well as executing his own brand of cynical realism.

　　There are obvious iconographic as well as formal similarities between the graphic works and the paintings, with the latter sharing the formers' two-dimensionality and lack of shading. Sky and water take on important roles as backdrops, in the mid-nineties, with the figures placed in the foreground as if cut out from boards standing upright in the clear cold atmosphere of the picture. At one point in the mid-nineties, the water takes over completely and submerges the tiny figures of swimmers struggling against the waves or floating corpse-like just below the surface.

　　Fang has come a long way from his early, monochromatic canvasses to the highly colorful paintings which verge on the decorative. Instead of the large shapes positioned at the very edge of the picture-plane, numerous figures are floating against a bright blue sky, dotted with clouds, and choppy deep-blue water. They are surrounded by flowers in bright blue, pink, yellow and green, also suspended in mid-air. The floating figures are children yet they still wear the typical expression of Fang’s curiously impersonal figures, caught between widely differing emotions and expressions, they convey the feeling of being neither happy nor sad, but probably very much on the brink between the two extremes. Their gender is equally ambiguous – are they bald boys or girls who share the grown-ups’ shaved heads which have been a characteristic of Fang’s personal iconography, too. They are already prominent in earlier paintings which combine disproportionately large blossoms with the close-up of a young girl in front of what looks like a painting-within-the-painting, showing swimmers. If the de-personalized figures can be traced back to photographs of Fang Lijun and his friends, snapshots that he used as starting-points for his paintings, then the flowers can be invested with some autobiographical meaning as well: when he was still at school, Fang’s teacher would tell them about the beauty of the flowers and liken it to the beauty of life in general- a life, which after all might turn out to be less than flower-like.

　　出处：《上海滩SCENE》，2003年1月第1期，第26—27页。

作者：Shi,Zhanwen