Of the 167 works at September’s CP Open Biennale, those of four Chinese world-renowned avant-garde artists were heavyweight contributions in supporting the Biennale’s visions. The artists belong to the Chinese avant-garde that found its momentum after Tiananmen in 1989.

　　Avant-garde in the Chinese context should be understood as a movement that started as a protest of society’s values. Artists then tended to use Western art language; while the language may be imitative, and the forms similar, it had a distinct meaning of its own. Under the slogan No U-Turn, the China Avant Garde opened their exhibition in 1989 with a collection of 293 paintings, sculptures, videos and installations by 186 artists, including Wang Guangyi, Xu Bing, Wu Shan Zhuan, Huang Yong Ping and Gu Wenda.

　　But the government closed the exhibition soon after its opening when two artists fired gunshots as part of a performance work. Although it was reopened, it was shut down completely two weeks later after reports that the gallery, the municipal government and the Beijing Public Security Bureau had received bomb threats.

　　The crackdown caused a temporary disruption in the momentum and for the artists to go into themselves, allowing a new energy to emerge. They became famous as “Political Pop and Cynical Realism”. There were also artists who left the country and developed their art toward universal significance, but their roots are forever shining through.

　　……

　　Different from Gu Wenda and Wang Guanyi are the younger Fang Lijun and Yue Minjun born, in 1963 and 1962 respectively, for whom the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) was a childhood memory leaving a bitter legacy.

　　Fang Lijun

　　Fang Lijun, who sent two paintings to the CP Open Biennale and came to Jakarta to talk on his art on Sept. 22, said he began to learn painting when he had to stay home to avoid being attacked in the street during the Cultural Revolution.

　　Indeed the 10 years of turmoil during the Cultural Revolution were hard on the family. Fang was born to a blue-collar family in the small city of Handan in Southern Hebei. Fang’s father was a cadre in the machinery division of the Ministry of Railways, but during the Cultural Revolution he was classified as a rich peasant and demoted to the post of train engineer.

　　In 1968 his grandfather was denounced as a landlord, with abusive messages pasted on their home. To Li Xianting, the Beijing scholar and art critic who is fondly called “Lao Li” (older brother), Fang once said, “I think of my whole life before China opened up to the outside world as hatred. Because I was born in the wrong class, I had to learn at a very young age to shut up, and fake it”.

　　After the Cultural Revolution, Fang began studying ceramics at the Hebei Light Industry College in 1980, and informally he also learned woodcuts. After graduating in 1984, Fang worked in art advertising and participated in regional art exhibitions. He was accepted for formal study in the print department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1985.

　　Fang Lijun’s images portray people with shaved heads or swimming through iridescent water, depicting contemporary people and their times in a style which has been termed Cynical Realism. Generally described as “rogue and ennui”, Li Xianting, foremost Beijing based critic and mover of the Chinese avant-garde, explains that rogue encompasses a Chinese cultural concept of cynicism, including the notions of joking, boisterous untrammeled behavior, an indifferent lack of restraint, and the ability to see through everything. The rogue is the last and staunchest enemy of authoritarianism, he contends.

　　In this sense, the bald-headed youth who first appeared in the artist’s paintings in the early 1990s and has since become Fang Lijun’s characteristic figure, has been widely interpreted as the symbol of disillusion, mockery and rebellion in present Chinese society, though Fang himself says he used bald heads simply to attract attention.

　　But more striking is Fang’s open-mouthed figures floating like baldheaded clones in an endless space. They seem to speak of uncertainty, a sense of premonition amid happiness. Images of facial expressions and grins akin to old people who have descended into dementia looking up to the sky, surrounded by flowers that seem artificial, evoke an eerie feeling of witnessing a stirring drama of people trapped in the emptiness of life.

　　The flowers may have a double significance as he was taught to paint flowers because of their beauty. But at one time when he was in a flower painting class, there was a dead body close by? Could the sweet scent and look of flowers actually be a cover for the stench of the real world?

　　A sense of double significance or ambivalence is also evoked by his water series. Water, according to Fang Lijun, can be relaxing and dangerous at the same time. It refers to life as well as death. Perhaps this is why he states that the translucent blue water embracing a man swimming on his back in one painting denotes the history of humankind.

　　The other painting in the same exhibition shows a fat baby hand blown up before a wide peaceful landscape with flowers floating in the air, perhaps a sign of hope or rebirth.

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　　One might wonder why these two painters would express critique through their own faces. I was told that it is the safest way to give social comment at a time when critiquing the government is a taboo. And using oneself as a model also saves time and money.

　　Whatever may be true, the paintings reveal an extraordinary depth of thought.

　　出处：The Jakarta Post, Sunday, 11.09.2003.

作者：Carla,Bianpoen