Fang Lijun and His Art

The western art is in renaissance with the coming of post-modernism. Artists are trying to review the classic modernism to seek a way in which the main techniques of modernism can be used for understanding and ratifying their current role rather than seek for styles and solutions.

People expecting tremendous change or new style are disappointed. New trends have been emerged, but they are more about different perspectives held by people and things with common attention which are closely related to artists’ living and working society. In Western countries, artists usually support the minority group, such as the Mexican migrants in USA, or deal with some widespread problems, such as pollution and AIDS pandemic, as well as paying special attention to the particular presence of those problems in their life.

I am more interested in the art development trend in countries whose development has been depressed for a long time by modernism. The new development in those areas might inject new blood into modernism. So far, the West has little knowledge about it because its art institutions are mainly concerned with local problems. The trend is clearly felt in Africa, Latin America and Asia. In China, the rising artists of a new generation since 1989, including Fang Lijun, represent the break with the traditional Chinese art and the attempt made to integrate Chinese philosophies and Chinese way of thinking with the techniques of western modernism.

Those artists share common experiences. Their adolescence and youth fell into a time when China tried to learn from western civilization. They are deeply concerned with the outcome of China’s rapid ongoing development and the possibility that those changes are going to overthrow the traditional Chinese virtues and values.

This concern takes various forms, from public critic and ironies to painful private retrospection. It is safe to conclude that there is no ideology in their art and that artists observe and enhance the general awareness of social problems rather than supply solution. This is the main function of modernist artists. It is ridiculous that few Chinese people have access to those art works made for them. Some artists, including Fang Lijun, have their career abroad. Some of them even have settled down abroad.

Fang Lijun stays in China. He lives a quiet life, making friends and raising dogs and flowers. This lifestyle is valuable for him. What is more important, whatever happened here is important to his life for he is able to live here.

Fang’s works are well-known for his earliest contribution to China’s art development. May other Chinese artists have incorporated Fang’s style into their own works. Fang communicates personal experience in his work. Some of his works even have the elements of self-portrait. His friends and family are his prototypes and some of his works takes prototype similar to himself. His works display intensive intimacy. Those finished works makes strong contrast with the whole creating process.

The stories described in those paintings are beyond understanding. Those paintings implicate something covered and mysterious. They present hopeless living, painful situation, fragility and instability. It often takes water and sky as background which respectively represents in his early works stability and permanent rules, change and movement. In the painting Swimming Pool, water represents flow of time and life, and body in the water that can only be partly saw or caught represents reality.

Actually, this is what Fang Lijun presents in his paintings, a glance, condensed life, intension and emotion. They often started with heavy colors and developed to a single light gray gradually and slowly in movements. To make the work more impressive, the characters will be enlarged to present with front faces or outline, for characters are usually the most important element to convey the “message”. Obviously, the message of Fang’s works is based on photographic aesthetics, TV, and movies. It is hard to define the exact message conveyed in his works. Very obviously, Fang’s works are highly personalized and are related to what he heard and saw in his living environment, but they also convey lots of fragility, not only limited to his personal life, but also involved in the realization of the complexity of life. His works convey the fact that good and evil are always together and you have to deal with both of them.

Fang Lijun is famous for his paintings. As a real modernist, he hopes that his art could be part of his life to an extent as large as possible. He persists broadening his themes and techniques, paints in a certain concentrating period and approaches other art styles in a measured way.

A review of history makes it clear that Cultural Revolution gives great impetus to China’s art development. Otherwise, some characteristics of contemporary would be hard to understood. Fang’s generation had spent their adolescence and youth in Cultural Revolution. They experienced the pass-down of revolution, the fierce social clash and the burning and damage of the great old architectures and inheritance in the name of revolution. Their lives were influenced by political philosophy of “the past is a threat to the future”.

Besides that, fast information dissemination is important in Cultural Revolution. Simple information need to be disseminated in a way that they are readable to the nearly illiterate people so the information has to be visual. A particular poster tradition is expanded against this background. Ironically, it is similar to American pop art which is based on capitalistic market.

Brief information, Avant garde writing and little painting space are important to Fang Lijun. He continued his development in his two years working in an advertisement company and painted a monumental poster displayed publicly. The complicated experiences are the basic components of themes and languages in the works created in the early 1990s. He redeploys space gradually, but not from the perspective of a traditional realist, but from the perspective of a permanent space of land, water and sky. The simplified characters in his works hold many secrets beyond our understandings.

More contact with Western art mean a lot for Fang Lijun. Fundamentally, he became surer about his identification with Chinese tradition. The contribution to the world art made by Fang Lijun and other artists of his generation is their perception and confidence on the importance of Chinese culture.

Fang Lijun doesn’t talk much about his works. He explained the implication of his drawings in a prose written in 1995: Hatred is not as horrible as the deliberate accumulation of hatred against others, and hatred advocacy is not as horrible as the mass acceptance of it. We are ready to hate those people from whom we learned to hate because that helps us to neglect hatred in our heart. Human nature is like a land where flowers and poisonous grass are growing, however, people only want to see flowers. Human beings are paying too high a price for the negligence of evil in human nature. We have to face the fact and weed out hatred like farmers weed out the grass. There is little need to doubt our ability to distinguish flowers and weed. What we need to admit is that evil in human nature is not less than intuitions.