Fang Lijun, another artist whose likeness has become part of the painted face of the new China, believes in the Taoist idea that, individually, one completes oneself .As this is traditionally achieved through study and self-cultivation, Fang's adherence to Taoist notions may seem surprising. He became famous for painting grimacing, shaved-headed, dim-witted hooligans that became the icons of mid-199os Cynical Realism. Their pinched and yawning facial expressions bespoke a psychic numbness. Fang's paintings were the silent yowls of a country unable to mourn the tragedy of 1989 (which the artist personally witnessed). In one example {pl.5o), rendered smoothly in gray tones, several lunatics hang out at the ocean's (the world's, the psyche's) edge, eyes closed and mouths half-open, like lobotomized self-portrait self-portraits. In another (pl.52), a huge orange face, its mouth agape as if drowning, sinks beneath the surface of cerulean water.

　　Fang’s work is different today: grandly ambitious, bizarre visions of heaven without any religious underpinnings. It is as though the mass mania of the Maoist era has become unhinged in the wake of Mao's dream. These are dreams belonging solely to the artist: personalized rhapsodies in which boatloads of Chinese cherubs, like baby Fangs, drift to and fro. To Western eyes Fang's vision may represent an untenable expanse of ego In Chin a, however, it declares the terms by which contemporary artists must still assert themselves. The inflated space of the state dream—with its collective power and captive audience, its cast of repeated characters, its masked emotions and cliches of the self, and its comic hook narratives—must be punctured and inhabited by individual artists, even if repeating cliches of themselves ad infinitum (a veritable army of personal likenesses) is the price they must pay to hold the dreamscape until the future arrives. It is no longer the job of the state to complete "the people." The artist, taking refuge in the eccentric, elevated space of the ancient literati, must struggle to complete himself as an individual, even as his single subject—numberless iterations of himself—drifts in a sphere that is not yet of this earth.

　　出处：《half-life of a dream》，2005年，P16—17.