August 13, 2008

　　UCCA Meeting Room,Beijing

　　Fang Lijun: Born 1963, Handan,Heibei province. Graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts; Lives and works in Beijing. The representative figure of the “Cynical Realist” movement, his major work is the “bald-headed” series of oil paintings.

　　Jérôme Sans: When did you start making paintings?

　　Fang Lijun: At age 5.

　　JS: What kind of paintings did you make at that time?

　　FLJ: I copied a cycle of images from the revolutionary opera The Red Lantern

　　JS: And then what did you do?

　　FLJ: It’s an ordinary story. I studied painting with teachers. I entered children’s painting competitions. I wanted to enter the art group at school, but I couldn’t.

　　JS: Why not?

　　FLJ: Because so many others wanted to enter, and I was the dumbest amongst them.

　　JS: So you were never part of an art group?

　　FLJ: By middle school, I changed strategies, and entered the group through the back door.

　　JS: What was your relationship to the ’85 New Wave?

　　FLJ: I was just a student then, so I only caught the tail end by participating in the 1989 China/Avant-Garde exhibition. The ’85 Movement was a major influence, but more as a counter-influence. As a student I would follow news of the movement, and in the end I realized that its promise did not belong to me and my peers.

　　JS: Some of your most famous paintings are of bald-headed characters floating through the air. Where do these come from?

　　FLJ: There were a few reasons. The first was physiological: I was a compulsive head-shaver at that time. The second was experimental: the first bald-headed paintings appeared when I was a senior in college. During college, I tried all sorts of different ways of making art, and this was a part of that experimentation. After these works had been circulated, I discovered first that they were extremely powerful, visually speaking. This power had a way of rubbing out the individuality of each subject, and this visual effect fit precisely with my understanding of the place of the individual in this society. Finally, the image of the bald-headed man is ambiguous. It is unclear exactly what kind of person he is, or what kind of position he occupies.

　　Later on I kept asking why I was painting bald-headed men. My earliest memory of this idea comes from when I was sixteen or seventeen and a high school student. One time we were successful in resisting some regulations the school principal put into effect. I suppose I have always had a rebellious streak deep inside me. And so painting the bald-headed men was a way of indulging the infatuation I felt with rebellion at that age and in that psychological state. I was not allowed to publicly show my discontent toward my surroundings at that time, and so the veiled critique of these paintings seemed like the most appropriate way to express my rebellion.

　　JS: And so you don’t know what these people are doing together—is it a strike, or is it a concert? I suppose it looks more like a strike.

　　FLJ: I work hard to remove any narrative. Perhaps they are individuals, perhaps against the background of society, or among other individuals, or lost in their own dreams. These scenes portray relations, but not specific stories.

　　JS: So it’s like Jackson Pollock and his ideal of a bigger picture taken from the outside?

　　FLJ: I don’t know about that [laughs]. It’s just a symbol. The individual is reduced to a symbol.

　　JS: What I mean is that it looks like the picture could grow on every side, and a specific canvas is just a detail, a focus on a specific scene.

　　FLJ: That’s right, and it’s a part of my creative drive. There are six billion people on earth, and so if you want to paint a single individual in relation to this population of six billion, that is impossible. You can only express this as intention.

　　JS: So it’s a thought about the population. But what does this population say?

　　FLJ: I don’t want to describe it so concretely, because the work is open and dynamic. Everyone can understand it in terms of their own experience or psychology or physiology, they can render their own judgment. To not like the work is its own kind of possibility.

　　JS: But they are quite allegorical too. More recently you began to paint babies, moving from the adult to the infant—one kind of bald figure to another. Why the baby? Is it about the birth of a new culture?

　　FLJ: These human forms are their own sort of symbol, a symbol of the human, not a stand-in for any particular individual. After so many years of painting in circles, I discovered that if the human form is a symbol, then the image of the child can stand for a more primitive state of humanity. So I thought it would be better to start painting children.

　　JS: What about the blue skies? The sky in this city is more often gray.

　　FLJ: There is one element that is extremely important in human relations, the connection between individual ability and dreams. Actually, the blue skies hint at these dreams. So they are a prop expressly for this purpose.

　　JS: From the sky to the sea, to the water, which is never the same. Or the clouds—the only thing that always evolves but is never the same.

　　FLJ: It’s a temporal order—first there is water, then it slowly enters the skies. Water is more realistic—for my generation and its experience of Chinese society and reality, water is a fitting vehicle for expression. It approaches the real. When it first appeared in my work, it was in this realist sense.

　　JS: What is this experience of water?

　　FLJ: Actually it is just the experience of people and society, or the individual and the collective, the self and the other. People are above all social animals; they cannot leave society, but they are often drowned by this society, by the damage it inflicts, or they are lost in society. That is a relation similar to the one between man and water.

　　JS: And so why are there birds and fish?

　　FLJ: Those came later. Much, much later.

　　JS: And then you started to include birds and insects—like a transition from humans to angels.

　　FLJ: Angels are not people?

　　JS: It’s a trajectory from adults to children, then from children to angels.

　　FLJ: Yes, it spans a wide range, from the water to the skies, to these animals. The entire structure of the animals is complex, as are the reasons for their appearance. There is a connection to my own growth, and the changes to the environment around me.

　　JS: You said in an earlier interview that when you were a child you dreamed of having ¥20 to buy instant noodles. But now your ideals must be so different from what they were in that era of poverty. Have your dreams become more fantastical? Or do they still pertain to specific things?

　　FLJ: That is what we were just talking about—the connection between an individual life and its unlimited ideals. Actually these insects convey a very complicated message. You can see them as people, as other living creatures. Insects seem trivial, but they have quite lofty ideals; people’s ideals are even loftier. It also touches on the blindness of life. We live each day thinking that we are sublime, that we have such strong reasons to keep busy, that we are struggling toward something, but no one can really say what our prospects are or what our dreams are. This is the blindness of life.

　　JS: Your dreamscapes seem to have evolved from the simple and innocent toward the nightmarish. I see so many different insects here, all looking to invade.

　　FLJ: Compared to my earlier works, which have a specific object of resistance, these emotions are rather easy to interpret. These days someone like me, or any Chinese intellectual, is up against a catalogue of hidden dangers and challenges. This kind of language has brought about a big change; the content of my works is no longer as clear as it once was, it now lacks a clear role or position.

　　JS: They are very beautiful, but also very noisy and dangerous, right?

　　FLJ: The message is more complex, and every person can view and judge the work according to their own experience, their own psychological and physiological state.

　　JS: Do you consider yourself a political artist?

　　FLJ: Artists have no way of escaping their environments, but they are also unable of turning their works into clear political programs; otherwise they become political activists.

　　JS: You also make sculptures of small heads on pedestals. Are these self-portraits? Portraits of other artists?

　　FLJ: Not only artists, but mostly artists.

　　JS: And these sculptures, which look like severed heads, what are they saying?

　　FLJ: There are two layers. First, these are all my personal friends; second, they are more or less the first generation of free intellectuals since the founding of the People’s Republic. They do not work for the government, the system, or the party. For me personally, these are people I met in the process of my life, and I have recorded them. Since the sculptures are made by taking casts of their faces, I actually do not participate in the production and function more as a documentarian. This is a fortunate, rare opportunity.

　　JS: What is the importance of this independence? Is independence a kind of power?

　　FLJ: This question has to be answered in the context of recent Chinese history. During the “revolutionary” period, there was no possibility of having independent intellectuals. If they existed, they were locked away in prison, driven crazy, or forced to pretend they weren’t intellectuals. They had no chance of survival. In my generation, society gradually opened up, allowing some people to take on independent stances, independent thinking. This group includes some key influences on Chinese culture—people like rocker Cui Jian, author Wang Shuo, and all these artists. Being able to record the people around me—documenting these famous friends—is a kind of good fortune, and a huge responsibility.

　　JS: So they are gold, to express their value?

　　FLJ: I added the gold, because these people are still living in this time, and so people have varied opinions about them, some very bad. But I thought about it from the perspective of history and decided that these people must be gold.

　　JS: In your studio I saw some small sculptures of figures scattered around the floor, or lying in the corner, like dust all around the room.

　　FLJ: This is one of the themes of my work. I have always dreamed that a work could clarify the real social position of the individual in society. I thought of many tactics, and the corner sculptures are a part of that.

　　JS: What do you think is the place of the artist in China today? What role do they play?

　　FLJ: I think artists have some basic responsibilities, which change over time. In the early 1990s, artists in China were important as holders of different opinions, people who could resist the system, saying “I don’t agree with those views,” or “I don’t want to live like everyone else.” That may have been the most important role, and the means used to accomplish it were secondary. I think that now the most important thing is for artists to blow away the smoke and clear away the branches, allowing us to see the true state of the individual or of our reality.

　　JS: In your work there are mostly men. Even the babies are male. I think I have only seen one or two women in your work. Does this have to do with the place of men in China’s new cultural revolution? Is it a satire?

　　FLJ: There are two reasons: first, these figures are supposed to be anonymous, not representing any specific man or woman, but merely a concept of the human; second, in China, nude female models are few and far between, and expensive, so the male form is easier to paint.

　　JS: You know, in Western art history, the first figurative work is a painting of Venus. So in Western art it has always been the female figure that has this abstract power to represent life, but in your work it is the male.

　　FLJ: Historically it was the same way in China. Our era though seems to be one of the most closed and conservative in Chinese history when it comes to gender. That is one of the problems now—gender play runs rampant and widespread in today’s China, but government regulations on this subject are extremely rigid and conservative.

　　JS: How do you see the new art boom of the last ten years in China?

　　FLJ: I think it is normal, because Chinese artists underwent so many years of being bound up, unable to express their own opinions or positions. Now, whether from the perspective of technical or objective conditions, Chinese artists have it better than ever. So artists’ creativity and passion for work in this period is to be expected.

　　JS: What will be the future?

　　FLJ: I am universally pessimistic about the future, so I live like a hedonist.

　　JS: Throughout history it has been rare for artists to open restaurants, to mix business with creativity. How do you reconcile the two?

　　FLJ: This is above all a philosophical question. Life cannot be regulated—that is an essential, fundamental starting point. If you feel that life can be regulated, it just means you are too young.

　　JS: I agree.

　　FLJ: The beauty of life is that every life is different.

　　JS: And the question is how to create a social dialogue, and how to share.

　　FLJ: Yes, and that includes creating a new life and a new lifestyle.

　　JS: How many restaurants do you have?

　　FLJ: Seven or eight.

　　JS: Will you develop these around the country or the world?

　　FLJ: I have a partner, that is who manages the project. When I began, I never thought of expanding in that way, it just happened gradually.

　　JS: Just like when you began painting, you didn’t think you would paint so much?

　　FLJ: Yes.

　　JS: Are these restaurants a place for conversation, communication, debate, and enjoyment with your fellow artists?

　　FLJ: The most important thing is not who is or is not an artist, but that life is full of traps. If you’re not careful, you might fall into one and be unable to climb out. The artist’s life is also a trip, because artists stay in their studios, one person decides everything, and it is easy for him to go crazy like van Gogh, or to turn delusional. For me this is a huge trap. I want to make art as a normal member of society, not as a mental patient. So I hope to maintain a normal, healthy relationship to society at large. Since opening this restaurant, I have become more of a “petty urbanite,” I have to keep books, to ask what I can and cannot do, what will make or lose money. Only by constantly measuring everything can I keep this business going. So for me the real meaning of owning a restaurant is that it allows me to escape from my studio, and turn in my identity as an artist for an identity as a normal person.

　　出处：《CHINA TALKS——INTERVIEWS WITH 32 CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS BY JEROME SANS》, 生活•读书•新知三联书店，2009年6月版，P16—P21。