Interest is a kind of man-made genius, while genius is a kind of natural interest. Without genius, your interest would never be realized; vice versa, without interest, your genius would become an abnormality. In today’s art circles, some are geniuses without interest; some have interest without being geniuses – Fang Lijun, is of course, a genius with interest. I still had not seen a Fang Lijun painting when an art groupie told me: “Fang Lijun is great. He is the only great artist I have ever met.” Dozens of art critics, fellow artists and Sino-culture vultures also speak of the 43-year-old artist in the same glowing terms. When I did finally see a Fang Lijun painting, I understood what all the fuss was about.

　　In early October, FANG LIJUN: TODAY, Fang’s largest solo exhibition to date was finally held at the Today Art Museum. The exhibition features about 100 works. Among them are many newly completed works, including oil paintings, prints and statues which are meant to reflect the lives of people living in this flashy new world.

　　Painting

　　Schooled at a young age in propaganda-oriented realism, Fang’s draughtsmanship is impeccable. He can add a few dabs of white to a canvas of blue oil paint and make you see a swimming pool.

　　The most striking piece in the exhibition hall is his large-scale color oil painting, Oil on Canvas 2004-2006, spanning 35 meters in length. It took the artist over three years to complete. The painting depicts bareheaded crowds, floating on the clouds, some laughing together, some yearning for and expecting with heads up. Fang’s paintings give you a feeling of a strip caroon; they hint at stories but a narrative never unfolds. They feature the figure of a shaven-headed man, alone or with a group of clones. This enigmatic bareheaded figure hunches his shoulders slightly and smiles, sometimes idiotically, as though he knows something you don’t. With dense rolling and fugacious layers of clouds, Fang tries to conjure up a feeling of following the inertia. “Clouds are like that,” said Fang. “I use of the inertia to let every part follow it, but it will finally reach the point where you should stop ‘seeing’, and ‘thinking’, for it will no longer follow the inertia “It is easy to create space in the paintings, but not the time. I twist the plane into a round hole, like the sewer. Some may be near to it; some may not, so the concept of time gradually forms.” Such treatment of clouds, in Fang’s words, is not only a technicaone, but also a kind of language, in which he tries to express his feeling of survival? Clouds become a kind of image of a power out of control.

　　There is another example Oil on Canvas 2006.5.31 – a huge boat like Noahs Ark, with expecting crowds cramming, sinking or floating. On the canvas of warm yellows and reds, the bareheaded man scratches his ear and hugs a plump woman; you feel that you’ve shared an intimate but comfortable moment with them.

　　Sculpture

　　Installation

　　Fang shows in this exhibition several sculpture works intermittently created over the last few years. Sculpture 2006 is about golden head portraits treated with real gold. The treatment of golden head portraits, similar to the crowds on the clouds piece, originated from Fang’s feeling of living in a flashy, money-oriented world. The golden heads are fixed on the ground by a thin steal wire swing with the flowing air, leaving people with warm, golden feelings but extremely unstable and unbearable like someone sitting on a fence.

　　Another series of works, Sculpture 2005.2.2, are long sculptures consisting of trodden human figures, gray without any shine or color and easily neglected next to all the other pieces of art. This neglected feeling is just what Fang is after, like the situations of many people in reality, being neglected, abandoned and even trodden on.

　　The exhibition also includes Fang’s Sculpture Installation 2006, an iron cage, with urchin-like figures inside, various kinds of toy weapons in hand, posing violently, making this artwork a piece of extreme satire.

　　From Fang’s crowds on the clouds to his sculptures, one can trace his changes over the last few years he develops an increasingly humanistic touch and it is evident that he worries about the situation of the common person. Since the late 1990s, Fang has changed his cynical and cheeky style of his early works. “These woks of swirls and clouds, including those in the corner, have already become a kind of necessity in my painting,” he said

　　“A fool is someone who is still trusting people 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.”– Fang Liju

　　In the eyes of fellow artists

　　Li Xianting, China’s leading art critic

　　Fang is the most gifted of the nation’s post-89 generation of Cynical Realist artists. He had created an articulation of the mix of ennui and rogue humor that pervaded Chinese society in the first half of the 1990s.Zhao Li, fellow artist.

　　Fang Lijun no longer cares about the so-called ‘avant-garde’ or ‘non-avant-garde’ criticism, but shows his uncommon freedom and ease resulting from his escape from the case is worth noting that Fang has already created his own visional structure through his pictures.

　　Xu Lei, fellow artist

　　It may be a kind of bias to think of Fang Lijun’s works as rebelling against society but in our common experience, to understand Fang’s art is to understand one of the ways of living in this world.

　　About the artist

　　Typically perceived as one of the instigators of the Cynical Realism movement, Fang Lijun is known for his oil paintings of bald men such as Oil on canvas 2004-2006, featuring nondescript figures. Ambiguous in nature, Fang’s works have often been viewed as expressing a feeling of disillusionment associated with the years after 1990’s. Fang currently lives and works in Being and exhibits both nationally and internationally.

　　Fang has participated in group exhibitions such as Mao goes Pop (1993), in Sydney, Australia, New Chinese Art (1998), in New York, USA and 2003’s Alors la Chine in Pris.

　　出处：BEIJING TODAY, 10.20.2006.