Fang Lijun’s exhibition at the Arario Gallery (November 6, 2008 to January 17, 2009) presented complex and intriguing ideas that show him breaking out of the mold that initially made him famous. As one of the pioneers of the Cynical Realism movement in contemporary Chinese art, Fang established his international reputation with images of generic-looking men with shaved heads and of swimmers in endless bodies of water. He continued to produce these for a long time, and he was a consistent favourite in the art market. Yet once one understood his iconic youths with their varying expressions of boredom, indifference, or disdain, every work seemed to convey the same message, and his success raised the question of how his art would develop. In the current exhibition, Fang responds to that question with works offering new layers of meaning that allow multiple interpretations. He introduces new motifs and characters that use earlier ideas as a springboard to expand in several directions.

　　Fang’s recent work appears, at first glance, to be visually pleasing and light in mood. Beautiful colours (apple red, sky blue, and cotton-candy pink) suggest happy times. Colourful butterflies, white birds, and winged babies are depicted flying across the canvases, and pudgy, pink-fleshed little figures frolic in the sculptural installations. While at the exhibition, I witnessed a group of college girls approach the sculptures in the first gallery, commenting on how “cute” they were. As soon as they ventured closer and saw that the “cute” figures were actually torturing each other on strange-looking contraptions, or being squished into pink blobs, they fell silent and walked away in short order. Indeed, the exhibition initially suggested that the artist has let go of his trademark cynicism and bleak perspective, but in fact, he presented a conflicted, more pessimistic view of the world than before.

　　Previously, Fang developed his themes primarily through human figures, whose appearances mirror his own. Now he expands his visual vocabulary and encompasses a broader perspective than in the past. Critic Karen Smith has noted that babies and dark skies appeared as motifs starting in the late 1990s.[1] To this cast of characters he has now added flying insects such as butterflies and fruit flies, and winged creatures like bats and birds. In some instances, they replace the human figures entirely. They are rendered meticulously in a style different from the broad strokes of earlier works. These “characters” lend a new complexity to Fang’s oeuvre because of their capacity to convey double meanings. Familiar motifs from the past do still appear, such as the painted children with shaved heads and the sculptures of babies that recall those same bald youths. Water remains a major element in several paintings and signifies danger and the unknown.

　　Each work carries a date as its title. According to the gallery’s catalogue, the titles indicate dates of completion. Although dates rather than description may, on the surface, seem matter-of-fact and devoid of deeper meaning, they serve as a guide to the trajectory of Fang’s thoughts. Considered in sequence, the paintings and sculptures tell the story of an artist vacillating between optimism and hopelessness. The current gallery installation does not display Fang’s works chronologically, so one has to reconstruct the narrative independently. Two of the earliest paintings, 2007.2.15 and the triptych 2007.1-3, 2007.2-3, 2007.3-3, show the artist reflecting on the cycle of life and death. The subject tackled in the former seems to be the catalyst for ideas explored in subsequent works. A composite of monochrome black-and-white images, suggesting newspapers as their source of origin, 2007.2.15 depicts the human casualties of war, famine, and murder. Hovering above this bleak landscape are specks of pink and yellow, which turn out to be winged babies and flying insects. The first triptych panel, 2007.1-3, depicts a baby floating within an ambiguous backdrop of grey and blue and occupies almost the entire space. The background extends across the next two panels, 2007.2-3 and 2007.3-3. In the centre panel, 2007.2-3, the baby has grown into a little child who jumps with outstretched arms toward a colourful array of butterflies and winged insects. In 2007.3-3, the same insects completely cover the prone figure of the child, and a small winged baby can be seen in the upper right corner. The three panels read from left to right, and suggest a narrative of three stages of human life, from birth to death, although death comes in childhood here. 2007.3-3 calls to mind the natural process of decay, in which maggots feed on a corpse. A maggot is the larval phase in the life cycle of a fly, so the appearance of flies on the child’s body, instead of maggots, adds notions of metamorphosis and rebirth to this image of death. One may even relate this last image to the Buddhist belief of reincarnation, wherein a soul has as much chance of being reborn in the next life as an insect as it has of being reborn as a human being. Thus the flies and winged babies in 2007.2.15 and 2007.1-3, 2007.2-3, 2007.3-3 seem to represent the survival of the human soul after death.

　　The forms, colours, and details of the butterflies in Fang’s paintings recall those embedded within the designs of Qing dynasty vases and embroidered silk garments. The butterfly is a common motif in traditional Chinese art because it is a symbol representing happiness. It was also popularized by the beloved Chinese legend of the Butterfly Lovers as a representation of metamorphosis and the continuity of the spirit. In this legend, Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, who fell in love as students during the Eastern Jin dynasty, are forced to separate when Zhu’s family arranges for her to marry another man instead of Liang. As a result, Liang dies of a broken heart. When Zhu’s boat passes by his grave on her way to her future husband’s home, a storm stops the boat from advancing. Zhu disembarks to pay respect at Liang’s tomb, and, at that moment, the ground opens up. Zhu immediately leaps into the gap and to her death. After some time, the grave opens again and two butterflies fly out, the spirits of Liang and Zhu transformed and reunited.

　　With this legend of Liang and Zhu in mind, the butterflies in the large oil painting 2008.10.1 can been seen as representing, on the one hand, the tragedy of human society with its senselessness, and, on the other, the possibility of hope even in death. Two landscapes unfold across seven panels in a format recalling traditional Chinese screens. On the left is Fang’s appropriation of an iconic photograph taken during the Vietnam War which shows General Nguyan Ngoc Luan, South Vietnam’s national police chief, shooting a suspected Vietcong captain at point-blank range. Fang shifted the row of buildings in the original photograph from right to left and added black crows and bats descending like scavengers that seemingly sense imminent death. The bullet creates a visible path from the gun barrel to the victim’s head. Exiting on the other side is a piece of brain, which transforms farther along the painting into a small baby with white wings who flies towards a sunrise and snow-capped mountains, and joins an array of butterflies and birds. The execution scene is rendered in black and white, evoking a newspaper image as in 2007.2.15. The landscape at the other end of the painting is in colour, with the crows and bats replaced by the butterflies and birds. The juxtaposition of the two scenes creates a narrative of both despair and hope. While one side displays the horror of cold-blooded murder, the other side offers a positive spin on the victim’s death. Death, even though involuntary, enables his soul (the winged baby) to leave behind the mortal world for paradise. Another multi-panel work, 2007.12.4, develops a similar idea, but in a less positive vein. The narrative begins on the left with a view of a weathered, misshapen steel wall punctured by a hole. Each subsequent panel depicts a closer view of it, as if the viewer were drawing nearer with each step. The last panels reveal a fly just beyond the hole, which joins other insects in a blue sky. The images of the wall bring to mind an ugly and undesirable place, but what the fly represents is ambiguous. Is the viewer the fly? Or is the viewer someone who remains on the other side of the wall, unable to reach the open sky? This ambivalence engenders a sense of yearning.

　　The bat, appearing frequently and sometimes together with butterflies, is also a motif used effectively to create layers of meaning. In 2008.6, we see a large group of them hanging upside down above a baby lying on a table in a room. The weathered, water-stained, and cracked wails evoke a prison cell (a setting used in several of the artist’s paintings). Moreover, rats, cockroaches, and centipedes crawl all over the ground. A soft light bathes the baby and the table and contrasts with the dark corners of the room. A white tablecloth, arranged to create swags across the ends, suggests a sacrificial altar. In traditional Chinese art, bats signify good fortune, because “bat” in Chinese sounds like the word for “good luck” Their appearance with the baby thus conveys the hope that new life brings. The positive message is complicated, however, by their positions immediately above the baby and their focused gazes, which contribute to a feeling of barely concealed danger. One bat even looks toward the baby with its fangs bared. The bats’ location in the dark recesses of the room also contradicts their function as harbingers of good luck. The prison-like setting suggests that the baby arrives in an ugly, limited world surrounded by predatory creatures, and it seems but a matter of time before the encroaching shadows will consume the baby’s light.

　　2008.6 is part of a larger series in which three weathered concrete walls appear. The paintings in this series are titled sequentially, for the first day of the month from May to September. The most intriguing is 2008.5.1, a painting within a painting, in which an image of a blue sky with puffy white clouds is framed by an ornate gilded frame and hangs on a barren wall. Upon closer inspection, the viewer sees that the fictive painting’s surface is spattered with blood and pasted with the actual bodies of flies. The flies appear to have mistaken the sky for the real thing and tried to fly into it. Victims of this mistake litter the ground below, recalling birds that have attempted to fly through a glass pane. Referring to another work in this series, Fang said: “Wherever you are, the authorities make good things for you to see and conceal what they say is bad, thereby keeping people in the dark. My painting is about a reality we can see, against one we are encouraged to believe in.”[2] Fang’s use of flies is particularly clever in relation to certain European still-lifes and portraits from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The European artists would sometimes add a fly, often on the edge of an illusionistic flame in a portrait or resting on a fruit or flower, to emphasize the success of their painted illusion, a claim for painting as a window to the real world. 2008.5.1 presents the other side of the coin from that of 2007.12.4. Whereas the earlier work postulates the possibility of escape from a bleak life, the fly in 2008.5.1 discovers belatedly that the possibility of freedom is but an illusion, and the price is death.

　　The feeling of impending doom evoked by 2008.6 also cloaks paintings depicting masses of children, such as 2008.3.30 and 2008.6.15. Each child looks like the next, face pointed upward with an expression of anticipation. All are crammed like sardines into boats or high-rise buildings. The children are in such abundance that their individuality is lost, and the life of each seems to bear little value. Moreover, the bird’s-eye view of the paintings reveals what the children may not have realized yet: concentric waves around the base of the buildings in 2008.6.15 suggest that they are sinking, and the boats are so heavy that only their top edges are above water. Several children are already in the water swimming around the edges of the waves. In both paintings, there is no land in sight, and no additional boats. The familiar bats, black crows, butterflies, and flies circle overhead. Their aesthetically pleasing colours and delicate details, along with the children’s innocent expressions and bright attire, make viewing the paintings a strangely enjoyable experience, despite the pessimistic message.

　　Fang expanded his art production into sculpture only recently, in 2006. The three-dimensional works in this new exhibition explore the same ideas as his paintings, but they do away with optimism. One of the strongest pieces is 2007.9.1, a seemingly abstract sculpture of nine pink cylinders lined up vertically on a rack. The order and symmetry of the composition lend the piece a formal beauty. That beauty is compromised, however, by the realization that the colour is derived from disturbingly realistic sculptures of fetuses, unceremoniously crammed one on top of another in the cylinders and submerged in a clear liquid. Is it amniotic fluid or formaldehyde? Are they waiting to be born, or are they dead specimens? The piece gives the phrase “test tube babies” a dark connotation. As with his paintings depicting masses of children, the sculpture provocatively questions the value of human life, leaving the viewer with feelings of horror and morbid fascination.

　　Fang also introduces a new character in his repertoire, the pink-fleshed giant “baby,” in his sculptural work 2008.9.11. Its skin colour is a nauseating light pink that looks synthetically produced. Variations of this baby also appear in the miniature worlds of 2007. 6. 6, 2007. 8.5, 2007.8.10, and 2008.2.20. In the exhibition’s feature work, 2008.9.11, giant babies are crammed into two cages that are connected like railway cars. Each figure brandishes a weapon, which in some cases protrudes through the railings. The title here, obviously, does not simply record a date of completion. The date 9.11 inevitably recalls the day of the worst terror attack on U.S. soil, making the viewer question whether these babies are future terrorists. Karen Smith suggests that the cages signify ideology, which controls and imprisons the minds of the masses. She interprets the figures as products of the modern Chinese culture and its obsession with material wealth, or as oppressed people on the verge of revolt. [3] The title suggests a threat, however, with the viewer outside the cages as the target. The padlocks on the doors are unlocked, so the figures can easily escape their enclosures, though they may not have realized that just yet. The roles of viewer and subject, circumscribed in the paintings, are reversed here. Now the threat of danger is directed toward the viewer.

　　Throughout his career, Fang has depicted human figures looking up, as if in constant search for hope, answers, or salvation. In his world, however, these hopes are ultimately betrayed. Fang may look for the silver lining in the dark clouds of human experience, but in most cases he views life as a futile endeavour. His new works show beauty in images of despair, inducing sadness in the viewer. I suspect Fang views this world with the same sentiment.

　　1 Karen Smith, “Fang Lijun: A Humanist In an Inhuman World,” Fang Lijun: 2008.11.06, exhibition catalogue (New York: Arario Gallery, 2008), 12.

　　2 Ibid., 18.

　　3 Ibid., 15.

　　出处：《YI SHU》(典藏国际版)，2009年3、4月刊，第8卷2期，第43—49页。

作者：Wang,Arleen,June