Fang Lijun Biography

Exhibition Notes:

I visited Fang Lijun’s studio the first time in the fall of 2004. He showed me the cold concrete slab in the unheated studio on which he knelt to carve the woodcuts when the cold weather permitted. Again in October of 2005, as I passed thru the garden leading up to his studio door, I spied a “family” of small Bronze figures with the smiling “skinhead” faces, Fang's trademark image. Symbolically, they were imbedded in the earth, as though growing out of it, their Bronze patina “suffering” distress from “living” in the rain and sun.

To me, they epitomized Mr. Fang’s vision of himself as a Chinese “everyman”: nurtured by the soil, toughened by the elements, representing the eternal river of humanity.

-Michael Berger, 2006

Chinese artist Fang Lijun, born in 1963, is the recognized leader of the “Cynical Realism” art movement. This generation of artists grew up during the Cultural Revolution, witnessed its subsequent demise (1977), and faced disillusionment when the mass movement to introduce democracy in China ended violently at Tiananmen Square (1989). Thereafter, artists turned to inwardness (Zhang XiaoGang), sarcasm (Yue MinJun), and irony (Wang GuangYi) to comment on the contradictions of life in China at the end of the 20th Century. Idealism faded.

Nevertheless, that was 15 years ago in a country where a year of change might take 10 years elsewhere. The better artists have deepened their art and moved on. Whereas in Fang’s earlier work faces were almost expressionless, his exploration of sculpture, a new medium for him, has given him the opportunity to develop much greater tactility and emotional expression.