David Barboza

　　BEIJING: The massive oil painting is 15 feet tall by 115 feet long -- so long that it bends at the corner of one museum wall and folds onto another wall. And it’s packed with portraits of bald-headed mini-men, an army of them, staring out at you -- a strange mass of humanity, floating through the air, hovering in the clouds, and wearing some of those odd, quizzical expressions that have become a signature of Fang Lijun’s work.

　　This is the artist’s long running motif about the relationship between the individual and the masses, and about authority and rebellion in China. What you see here are heads -- lots of clean shaven heads, cleverly sketched heads that have helped make Fang Lijun one of the country's most respected artists.

　　For years, he has painted colorful portraits of bored, rebellious and indifferent young men, men who have rebelled by falling asleep or doing nothing more than looking disillusioned or disinterested in the world around them.

　　Now, Fang Lijun -- that Cynical Realist painter of armies of bald guys -- is being honored in Beijing with his first solo exhibition, at the newly opened Today Art Museum.

　　That Fang Lijun has never had a solo show in China is remarkable because he’s one of the country’s best-known artists. His works have been exhibited in over 20 countries; his paintings have sold for as much as $423,000. And his life and work is portrayed in great detail in the art critic Karen Smith’s book, “Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant-Garde Art in New China.”

　　Li Xianting, the distinguished Beijing art critic, once called Fang Lijun the most talented artist of his generation. At the age of 30, his painting “Series 1, No. 3,” a portrait of a young man cynically yawning, appeared the cover of the New York Times Magazine.

　　He has been invited to exhibit at the Venice Biennale and over the past two years, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York have each acquired his works for their permanent collections.

　　The Beijing show -- which ran from Oct. 7 through Oct. 31 -- was simply called “Fang Lijun,” and it was packed with over 100 works, including recent oil paintings, ink-and-wash paintings and sculptured model heads, miniature gold plated heads -- heads on strings, squishy plastic heads and life-size models of the heads of friends and visitors to his studio: people like Ai Weiwei, Hung Huang and Yue Minjun.

　　Perhaps it is a sign of the changing times. After years of ignoring the avant-garde and harboring suspicions about a group of artist who seemed to play political games in their paintings, the Chinese government is starting to accept (though hardly embrace) the country's leading contemporary artists -- men like Wang Guangyi, Fang Lijun, Zhang Xiaogang and Liu Wei; or at least the government is allowing them to venture out into public, with their shows of experimental art works.

　　798 -- the artistic center of Beijing -- is no longer under the threat of the wrecking ball. In fact, construction crews are arriving daily to help transform this old factory site into a thriving, commercial arts district.

　　One might say that avant-garde art has finally arrived in China, just as it has begun to ascend the world stage. Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the world’s biggest auction houses, are selling Chinese contemporary art pieces at record prices. American and European galleries and moving here en masse. And television crews are showing up to meet Ai Weiwei, the bearded barrel-chested Beijing artist, asking him for tours of city’s dynamic new arts and cultural centers.

　　And strangely, artists who have mostly been exhibited, collected and loved abroad, are now beginning to show their works at home, right in the heart of the capital city.

　　And it’s that post-1989 group that remained in China, struggling to find their own path in the art world through the demoralizing 1990s that is now reaping the biggest gains.

　　Few artists here are as big or as influential as Fang Lijun. At 43 years old, he’s believed to be the richest avant-garde artist in China (though Zhang Xiaogang must be closing in). He owns six restaurants, a small hotel, drives a black Audi, has studios in Beijing and western Yunnan Province and was recently selected, along with Wang Guangyi and Zhang Xiaogang, to create a huge painting for the Shenzhen subway system. It is the first time a group of avant-garde artists have produced work for a government owned public space.

　　But the journey from Hebei Province to internationally acclaimed artist has not been an easy one.

　　Fang Lijun says his work has always been haunted by his early struggles as a child of the Cultural Revolution; that there were times when he was bitterly hungry, and when he doubted he would become an artist.

　　Yet today, friends, critics and collectors say he’s the consummate businessman, an artist with an eye for details.

　　He is also an artist with great timing. He came up just when the Beijing art scene was beginning to blossom with the '85 New Wave Art movement; that was the year he began his studies at the country's finest art academy: the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. And after 1989, when things looked bleak and so many artists fled Beijing or went overseas, he stayed on in the city -- married a German woman who helped him get acquainted with foreign art circles -- and helped form an artistic community on the outskirts of Beijing, in an area called Yuanmingyuan. There, he helped give birth to a style of painting that came to be known as "Cynical Realism."

　　Of course, like all artists here, he has his critics, many of whom argue that Fang Lijun is too business savvy, that he has spent too long portraying bald, disoriented young men, and that he is to wedded to creating his own recognizable brand.

　　They also say that he -- like other prominent artists here -- has created an art factory. Critics say some of the best-known painters churn out painting after painting, and then extend their brands by creating sculptures, installations, silk screen prints, statues and other commercial goods.

　　What’s next, some critics joke, a line of Fang Lijun toys or apparel?

　　But few critics question his painting skills. He also has a talent few other artists have, some experts say: he is remarkably articulate when he talks about his own works, explaining the ideas behind his works and the context in which they're created.

　　“When Fang Lijun talks about his works, he really knows how to explain them; he really thinks about his work,” says Weng Ling, director of the Shanghai Gallery of Art and a classmate of Fang Lijun's at Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. “Not even the critics can explain what he’s trying to do.”

　　But now, experts wonder, what path will Fang Lijun take? Will he change course? Will he develop new themes, or carry on with the bald guys for another decade or two?

　　No one knows for sure. But in a lengthy interview here in his studio on the outskirts of Beijing, in the artist colony called Song Zhuang, Fang Lijun sat down with a tray of tea, surrounded by art magazines and some works in progress, and began to explain how he came to this point; and how he struggled to overcome the hardships of his youth.

　　II. THE YOUNG MAN FROM HANDAN.

　　Fang Lijun was born in 1963, in the city of Handan in northern Hebei Province. Three years later, the Cultural Revolution swept the country into a decade-long period of social and political madness.

　　This was an age when authority, intellectuals, “counter-revolutionaries” or the relatives of capitalists or one-time landowners were denounced, harassed, beaten and even killed. And Fang Lijun remembers that as a child, he was told his family had a background problem.

　　From an early age, he says, he had to cope with a world where social and political currents changed almost overnight; and where human nature often turned brutal.

　　“I got a little shocked by all this,” he says. “In some ways you have to have two systems in your head. One is you’re told your family is bad; the other is the warmth you feel toward them.”

　　He says his father worked as a railroad engineer and was punished by being sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. One day, Fang Lijun says, he joined a denunciation session, only to discover that the man being denounced was his grandfather, who was taunted as “Landlord Fang.”

　　Schools were closed, boys went fishing, or engaged in petty thievery, he says. And when they played games, Fang Lijun almost says he always lost, because -- the other boys insisted he was a loser.

　　“You can’t win,” he says they’d tell him. “You come from a bad family.”

　　And so even as a child, he says, he had to learn to play the game: to taunt, to make fun, to make a spectacle, to appear to be in the crowd, even if he wasn’t with the crowd.

　　When there was a contest for coming up with slogans or words to denounce counter-revolutionaries or bad guys, young Fang Lijun made a name for himself by writing and presenting a story called “Dickhead Confucius is a Stupid Pig.”

　　Strangely, this kind of atmosphere opened the door to art. He says his father worried about him getting into trouble, and so his father bought the young boy art supplies, and also hired an art teacher.

　　“My father wanted to protect me,” he says. “So since he was a train driver he’d go to Beijing and buy some paint and books for me.”

　　Fang Lijun says he was very good at Chinese literature in school, but he was also good at painting, which he took up at the age of 4 or 5. But his memory of his youth is a mixture of anguish and nostalgia.

　　“I was born into that situation so it’s hard to talk about,” he says. “I was just like a sheep. When you’re suffering it’s incredible. But when you look back you see it may have been valuable.”

　　Things changed, however, after Mao died in 1976, and the Cultural Revolution came to an end. The tides of change, he says, could be reflected in the slogans of the time.

　　For a while everyone praised Lin Biao, who was seen in films as the closest man to Mao. And then he was denounced as a traitor. For a while, everyone chanted “Long Live Mao.” And then he died and everything changed again.

　　After the Cultural Revolution, Fang Lijun -- the younger of two boys -- went on to study ceramics at the Hebei Light Industry Technical College in the city of Tangshan in Hebei Province.

　　After graduation, he got a job at a state-controlled advertising agency, but soon grew bored and left to try to work on his own.

　　He tried opening his own advertising agency, but spent much of his time doing odd jobs, like construction work. But he says things just got worse and worse, and so he decided to go back to school and get his high school diploma, which might enable him to go to college.

　　III: OFF TO THE CENTRAL ACADEMY.

　　He applied to China’s top arts college, the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and even made a trip to get some help from the faculty, including Xu Bing, who was a young professor in the print making department at the time.

　　Fang Lijun enrolled at the Central Academy in 1985, when avant-garde art and artists like Gu Wenda and Wang Guangyi were just beginning to gain prominence.

　　Fang says going to Beijing was somewhat unreal for him. “For me, it was like, in one step you went to heaven,” he says.

　　His classmates were rising stars of the next generation, like Liu Wei and Mao Yan. But early on, he kept to himself, studying woodcutting and searching for a painting style to call his own.

　　“Before I painted the bald guy I tried many, many styles,” he says. “I tried one with long hair and then I felt this was the one that reflected me. It happened accidentally.”

　　His earliest paintings are colorful rural scenes, farm fields and exercises in portraying the human body or rocky, textured roads.

　　Then, in 1988, he says he began painting rural life with pencil on paper sketches that depicted stone fences, cobblestone grounds and groups of clean-shaven young people.

　　Everything in his portraits was rocky or barren, and in many of the portraits -- even the oil paintings——he showed bald young people, some walking, smiling, lining up; some with mis-shapen heads, portraits that over time, looked more serious and dour -- smiles fading to groping, and even men with a kind of primitive appearance, lurching forward like cave dwellers.

　　He told the art critic Karen Smith that it was largely by accident that he came upon the bald figure.

　　“I was going through a period of confusion about what I was being taught and couldn’t find my own direction artistically. It must have been the heat of summer or something. Coincidentally, soon after I saw some photographs that a classmate had taken of the farmer from Taihang Mountain. I recognized the physique as being perfect for the paintings I wanted to create. Somehow I translated these farmers into bareheaded figures.”

　　A few of these early works even made it into the China Avant-Garde “No U Turn” show at the National Gallery, which was closed after a young female artist named Xiao Lu fired a pistol in her installation.

　　The year 1989 was a time of fervent, of student demonstrations and idealism. In China, the 1980s were America's 1960s. Li Xianting, the art critic, had already met Fang Lijun. The two shared same hometown -- Handan. And before long a close friendship between the critic and the artist would begin. In fact, Lao Li, as he was called, selected several of Fang’s pieces for the National Gallery show.

　　Fang Lijun says initially he wanted his work to be about nature and the countryside. But after June 4, his style changed. and you can see this in his pieces.

　　He opens a catalogue of his works, and points out the changes.

　　“The difference before June 4 to me is realism,” he says. “In the background you can see stones. But after June 4, there is no background; people need their own space. This is no limit. Also, before they are in the country; now they are in the city.”

　　Then he adds: “That was a reflection of the sadness of reality. You can’t bear the sadness of reality. So you need more space.”

　　He says it all happened gradually, but he gained confidence in his work. But his artistic ideas, he says, were fueled by the pain of 1989, after the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square were crushed.

　　“I almost felt something happened that was connected to my childhood, and so it never left me,” he says of that time. “After middle school my situation got better and better. But in 1989...” he says trailing off.

　　Fang says he wanted to create something very human, to do something to show “I don’t agree with what you did.”

　　He also chose to go out on his own after graduating that year. He moved outside of Beijing to an area called Yuanmingyuan. And soon other artists followed suit, creating a small artists community there.

　　Many well known artists left Beijing after 1989. Many artists, like Xu Bing, Gu Wenda, Huang Yong Ping and Cai Guoqiang, went abroad.

　　Fang Lijun says that for a while, he was without a job, doing odd things, painting and searching for the right kind of portraits.

　　“My biggest desire was if I had 20 RenMinBi I could buy a box of instant noodles. So I wouldn’t be starving when I work.”

　　But he remained optimistic. China is a big country, he says he thought at the time, it couldn’t be a grey area on the world's map for long. And so he painted and painted, expecting that in two or three years things would open up and he’d be able to make a living as an artist.

　　And so he sold almost nothing, until 1992, when Li Xianting, in a now famous review, praised Fang Lijun as one of the most gifted artists in the country.

　　And when Andrew Solomon, a freelance writer came to China to write about experimental art, Li Xianting told him about Fang Lijun. And so in 1993, Fang Lijun’s groping bald men -- evolving increasingly into cynical beings,“cynical realists” in Li’s words, made the cover of The New York Times magazine.

　　Many in China say Li Xianting “discovered” Fang Lijun. But in fact, many experts here say there were only a handful of talented artists in Beijing; and Li Xianting was close to all of the younger ones, like Liu Wei and Fang Lijun.

　　What does Fang Lijun say: “From '89 to '98 you can look at the art critics. Almost no one did anything. Li was the only one. So you can see how important this was. The whole country, one voice.”

　　IV: WHO’S A FOOL?

　　Around that time Fang Lijun got married to a German international aid worker named Michaela Raab, and began attending functions with foreigners, showing off his paintings.

　　His world quickly opened up, and by 1993 he was fielding invitations from the Venice Biennale, from France, Germany and Australia.

　　His groping, cynical, playful portraits of bald men yawning, laughing, looking sleepy, wearing leather jackets and swimming were gaining popularity with international collectors.

　　The images were not directly political. But many critics read them as harsh critiques of what was happening in China; young men had lost their ambition, their idealism and their passions -- and were somewhat bored, tired and disillusioned with the world.

　　In 1992, Fang Lijun was quoted as saying: “A fool is someone still trusting after being taken in a hundred times. We’d rather be lost, bored, crisis-ridden misguided punks than be cheated. Don’t even consider trying the old methods on us, we’ll riddle your dogma with holes, then discard it in a rubbish heap.”

　　Everyone knew who and what he was talking about. And usually, he spoke with increasingly colorful portraits of naughty bald men, clean-shaven young men who liked just like him.

　　He also exhibited in private homes in Beijing, and spent much of his time hanging around his closest friend, the artist Liu Wei, who was also making a name for himself as a Cynical Realist painter, though his works were hardly of the same ilk.

　　In a way, Fang Lijun -- like Wang Guangyi, Zhang Xiaogang and Li Shan and others -- had hit on the perfect formula. He was painting himself, his own feelings, just what he liked; and yet he was making a kind of political statement, which is what westerners were interested in. They wanted to buy into the rebellion or veiled political ideas.

　　And when Hong Kong gallery owners came to Beijing, they typically met the critic, Li Xianting, who talked to them about Fang Lijun.

　　Critics say Fang Lijun’s works are thoughtful. There is something to his monkish, punkish bald men, they say. Some walk in unison, as if marching; some look pre-historic, like cave men -- so programmed and controlled they have no direction.

　　Fang Lijun is painting about control, about the individual whose activities are monitored and controlled by the state; he’s painting about the quiet rebellions that largely occur in the mind; and about the secret codes of expression that have long been known to exist in China.

　　“I think this is something related to my childhood experience,” he says of the meaning behind his art works. “I don’t do something very clear, to show my meaning. I do something technical, so I don’t show the spiritual side; so I don’t get pressure from the government.”

　　Fang Lijun has thought about these things, deeply. He is the artist as intellectual, or at least would like to present himself that way.

　　He says: “In Chinese history, the meaning of intellectuals is you should have independent thoughts and views. But in China, the intellectual should work for the government and they are just a tool. So how can you have independent thoughts; so the tool must die or hide what they think.”

　　Many critics have placed Fang Lijun in the front ranks of the art world. His painting technique is admired; his subject matter is simple yet thoughtful. It follows the course of his life, and his interest, and yet in some ways chronicles the times.

　　His paintings are almost spiritual in appearance. They are filled with people drifting up toward the clouds, or submerged under water. Masses of bald figures -- many of them quite young -- hold their hands up, almost in prayer. The works are increasingly populated by bright colors and flowers, but almost always appear crowded with bald people lost in the larger universe.

　　In her book "Nine Lives," Karen Smith writes that as Fang Lijun has grown older, the figures in his art works have grow progressively younger, and perhaps more naive.

　　“Fang Lijun points to both the innocence of childhood that had been denied him, and the sense of loss this engendered as he matured, mingled with the mass blindness of society.”

　　His bald creatures are both rebels and the masses of naive people.

　　In recent years, his works have featured more color, less cynicism, and even the appearance of more babies and children, perhaps because Fang Lijun is now a father, having been married a few years back to a former dancer.

　　Critics say his works are now a reflection of this gilded age in China -- hence his golden heads -- many of them, in his solo exhibition, shown climbing wires or strings, sitting in the clouds, rushing in what appear to be huge mobs, eager to get ahead.

　　And partly the change is due, they say, to the country’s opening up; the freedoms that artists like him now have, so long as they do not make portraits directly offensive to the government.

　　But, in many ways, Fang Lijun is climbing too; his works are fetching high prices on the auction market (even though some failed to sell at a recent Sotheby’s auction); he’s apparently got an army of helpers to create his mass of sculpture works and paintings. And he’s got several well-regarded restaurants in Beijing.

　　On a quiet night in Beijing last month, he packed up his things in his black Audi, stopped by to make a visit to Li Xianting, and then went to his Beijing restaurant, which serves Hunan food.

　　He smiled and joked and talked about his efforts to collect antiques and calligraphy. And then he met a representative from Arario, the Korean gallery that is now representing him.

　　It may be another sign of the times: the young, naughty, disinterested and lost soul has found himself in the clouds. And so he’s busy making things happen; selling art, opining on the nature on intellectual and humanism, talking about the pain and suffering he encountered during the Cultural Revolution; and he's producing art -- huge works of art that are hard to miss.

　　出处：《中国艺志》，2006.12，P5—11页