Curator’s Note
A pioneer of China’s ‘Post-1989 New Art Movement’, Fang Lijun was born in 1963 in Handan, Hebei Province, and graduated from the Printmaking Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1989. Since the early 1990s, his iconic ‘bald-headed’ figures have pioneered the ‘Rascal Culture’ and ‘Cynical Realism’ (Li Xianting, 1991) in Chinese contemporary art. In 1993, one of his works was even used for the cover of The New York Times Magazine –marking the first time for Chinese art. Furthermore, the work was considered to embody ‘the howl that could free China’ (Mark Sherp, 2001), making Fang a hotly pursued artist by many major international art museums, art foundations, and public exhibitions. Since the beginning of his artistic career, Fang Lijun has constantly been identifying himself with ‘living like a wild dog’ that traverses the peripheries of art, form, time, language and power to capture the shared pains and feelings of the present time and life in a transcendental manner. As one of the key motifs of his art, Fang Lijun’s ‘Human & Figures’ works deconstruct the interplay and mixture between the typical portraits and stereotypical faces of an era. Using ‘Human & Figures’ as a narrative clue, this exhibition aims to provide a classic yet fresh perspective on Fang Lijun. We strive to showcase the creative journey during the last decade that the artist has taken, with a particular focus on his new experiments with a variety of media that range from traditional Chinese painting, oil painting, print, and sculpture to the virtual space of NFT.
There has always been a profound and inexplicable connection between art and people: Where do we come from? Where are we now? And where are we heading for? How do we see ourselves? How shall we view others? And how shall we make sense of this world in which we live? ... These fundamental questions regarding the identity of human beings sparked a genre of art that has enjoyed remarkable longevity and enduring popularity in both the East and the West. Having borne the name of ‘portrait painting’ or ‘figure painting’ in the past, such a genre fulfilled various social functions in human history, including religious edification, political propaganda, international diplomacy, pictorial documentation, status manifestation, etc. For Fang Lijun and his art, the ‘bald head’, as the typical face of China in a specific era, has already become part of the art history. Nowadays, his problematics have evolved to include questions about how to deepen or even create anew a set of idiosyncratic and distinctive visual lexicon and how to transcend the history of art and the ‘Fang Lijun’ within art history in a constant process of promotion and development. The gradual transfiguration from ‘universal’ men to a ‘concrete’ person, from outward expression to inward exploration, and the deliberate movement toward tradition and his own cultural roots, have marked the artist’s life experience as he enters his prime, and become one of the main characteristics of his art in recent years. The motif of ‘Human & Figures’, which combines such a diversity of visual elements as Peking opera masks, Chinese New Year pictures, caricatures, sketches, photographic filters and fisheye lens, is applied in a ‘generic’ way to ‘portraiture’ with different media. Whether it is the grand scale of ink figures or the minute details of a person’s beard and hair, the artist’s extraordinary artistic prowess and sincere love for mankind are evident. This love is also manifested in the frequent appearances of the artist’s deceased friends in his works which rarely fail to draw sighs and tears from me as the curator.
For this exhibition, we have chosen to present four main sections: ‘Passage: The Process of Growing Up’, ‘Introspection: Self-Portraits’, ‘Mutual Reflections: Friends’, and ‘The Light of Dust: Human’. Besides these sections, we also attempt to elaborate on the theme of ‘Human & Figures’ in this first solo exhibition of Fang Lijun in Macao with a temporal clue through two additional displays of ‘Video’ and ‘Publications’. The artist himself has chosen to name this exhibition ‘The Light of Dust’, which means ‘concealing one’s brilliance to merge with the dust’. It has been a long time since the contemporary China needs, so much like today, the artist to reaffirm his advocacy of individuality, freedom and human rights, a stance he has been upholding ever since his ‘wild dog’ period. It has also been a long time since people in the contemporary world, so much like today, need to be extremely cautious against the threat of totalitarianism (often labelled as collectivism or ‘following the crowd’) and to uphold the ideals of universal equality and compassion. ‘There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.’ (E. H. Gombrich). This exhibition places Fang Lijun’s ‘Human & Figures’ works against the backdrop of the vicissitudes of the social image and spirituality of ‘the Chinese people’ in the past forty-plus years in comparison to the details of the artist’s own creative history and the entire history of Chinese contemporary art. We sincerely invite all the viewers, both online and offline, to take a glimpse, through Fang Lijun’s works, into the zeitgeist of contemporary China and lend a listening ear to our own internal voices. Meanwhile, we also wish the artist ‘Fang Lijun’, who has constantly been breaking off with the past, will keep the momentum and reforge the pioneering artistic life and spirit in the coming era.
2022.4
Luo Yi
Curator