Fang Lijun: From Cynicism to Freedom
If you ask someone out of the blue how they react to the world, then how do you assess the answer? Outside the narrow confines of psychological testing, such questions are meaningless. Who? When? Where? What happened? What reaction?People usually evaluate questions according to particular criteria and in line with commonly accepted standards regarding what is good and, before even addressing that big question, they want to clarify the grounds on which they are conversing with you. When Fang Lijun, born in 1963, was asked, after 1989, about his reaction to the world, he answered:
The bastard can be duped a hundred times but he still falls for the same old trick. We’d rather be called losers, bores, basket cases, scoundrels or airheads, than ever be cheated again. Don’t try to teach us a lesson using the old methods, because a single statement based on that old dogma raises thousands of questions, and then we’ll only deny the lot and toss it on the trash pile.[1]
At the time Fang Lijun made that comment, he was nearly 30 years old, living in a poor rural area near the Yuanmingyuan ruins in Beijing and putting the finishing touches to the first group of oil paintings stamped with his own style. According to him, ‘a lot of obstacles and inconveniences had been cleared away’, and now he felt ‘it was smooth sailing’.[2] These comments would seem to imply that this young artist had finally found his freedom. However, out of context, it is difficult to know the reference points and meaning of those two seemingly unrelated statements by Fang Lijun, especially in the context of the way of thinking generated by the intellectual emancipation movement of the 1980s. For that generation, who had embraced Nietzsche’s dictum that god is dead, skepticism regarding the legitimacy of all principles and values was an automatic response. In the early 1990s, Fang Lijun expressed rage, not the playful cynicism that became the rubric applied to his art, and that rage evinced an absolute refusal to believe in anything. What was the source of Fang’s rage?
Fang himself did not believe in instinct: ‘Abstract human instinct doesn’t exist, instinct being something shaped later by society’. Fang Lijun was born towards the end of 1963, and this pure soul (later to appear as a baby in some of his paintings) emerged at the time when Mao Zedong had just convened a plenum of Political Bureau committee members and regional secretaries in Hangzhou to discuss rural socialist educational problems. The meeting resulted in the release of The Draft Decision on Several Questions in Present Rural Work, a political document that emphasized the importance of class struggle in determining whether socialism succeeded or failed. Fang Lijun’s grandfather had been a landlord and, from 1949 onwards, this classification meant that the person so identified thereafter had no political rights or legitimacy. (Fang Lijun’s grandfather in fact had household registration as a ‘rich peasant’, but during that class struggle, he did not have possibility of appealing against his classification as a landlord.) Against a background of increasingly intensifying class struggle, classification as a landlord singled out a person as a target to be ‘struggled’. During different historical periods, the Communist Party of China strategically utilized different social classes and groups for immediate tactical purposes, for example during the war of resistance to Japan when the CPC wanted to set up a coalition government with the Kuomintang and immediately after 1949 when it needed stability for the post-war economy to recover. In a system where the supreme leadership arbitrarily determined Party and government policy and made all decisions, disagreements and conflicts within the CPC were manifested throughout society and, to meet the needs of class struggle, individuals with landlord status had no protection at any time.With no experience of life, the young Fang Lijun was at a loss to understand what the world expected of him, but he was unable to escape the increasingly intense political atmosphere unleashed with the ‘Four Clean-ups’ (Si qing) political campaign. He was child with no understanding of society, but in 1966, with the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the physical and verbal violence perpetrated in the name of the ‘revolution’ left an indelible impression on him. Today it is very difficult for us to assess the emotional fallout incurred from hearing, in 1967, the neighbor’s child shouting out ‘Overthrow the landlord Fang’, but the effect on young Fang Lijun of finding that slogan scrawled on the wall of the back of the family home could not have been positive. In 1969, Fang Lijun was 6 years old, and he recalls taking part that year in a Red Guard criticism session attacking someone who was an ‘evil old class enemy’. Fang has described how he joined in the shouting, ‘String him up!’, only to discover that the ‘old class enemy’ targeted was his own grandfather. Such tragic coincidences were not uncommon in the history of China’s political movements after 1949. How was a child to choose between an instinctive ‘goodness’ aroused by feelings of kinship and a social environment that condemned such ‘goodness’? Did ‘revolution’ rather than ‘goodness’ better suit the people’s needs? Or was it better to believe that ‘goodness never existed in this form’? Fang Lijun grew up in an environment characterized by revolution and physical violence. When he was learning to write, the young Fang Lijun gradually learned to copy what the teacher, or rather the system, demanded; he transformed the dense black smoke belching from the factory into brightly colored clouds that sang the praises of socialism. Fang Lijun remembers: ‘Because I was born into the wrong class, I had to learn at a very early age how to put up, shut up and fake it. In 1976 when Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong died in succession and we went to pay our respects, my father gave me a look, and I knew I was supposed to cry, but I couldn’t. But then I cried uncontrollably and people came up to pacify me. My teachers praised me. I then realized that if I behaved in a particular way, I’d be commended. And so this was one of the results of my childhood education. My schooling had taught me the exact opposite of what was intended, but probably at that time I had already become two-faced. You had no choice in the matter. Your childhood environment was just too oppressive to do otherwise’. [3] It was at this tender age that Fang Lijun learned the game of switching between good and bad, as well as to not question how a rigidly defined society clung to an abstract idiosyncratic rationale.
Fang Lijun’s personal background is, in fact, unremarkable, and everything he experienced was a part of daily life for the majority of ordinary Chinese people. During the years of class struggle, nobody felt secure, and self-preservation was governed by no moral criteria. Moral standards did not exist, having been totally supplanted by the criteria of class struggle.
In order to avoid the unforeseen, Fang Lijun accepted his father’s advice and studied painting. During middle school, his experience studying in a fine arts group and later at the amateur art classes organized by the Handan Municipal Masses Arts Museum aroused his love of painting, and this laid the foundations for his later art career.
In 1980, Fang Lijun entered the Hebei School of Light Industry, where he could study art in a relatively more professional environment but, more importantly, new things were happening in the Chinese art world during that year and the linguistic context of contemporary art was changing. In June 1979, World Art (Shijie meishu) began publication, and in it appeared an article by Shao Dazhen, a teacher of art history at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, titled ‘A Brief Introduction to Schools of Modern Western Art’. Prior to then there had been a total prohibition on Western modernism. Prior to October 1976, the journal Fine Arts (Meishu) published the artist Wu Guanzhong’s article ‘The Beauty of the Form of Painting’ (Huihua de xingshi mei) which also broke censorship barriers because ‘formal beauty’ had long been regarded as bourgeois, and it too had been forbidden and criticized. In August the 8th issue of Picture-Story Book News (Lianhuanhua bao) published the comic series Maple (Feng), which was a political critique of the Cultural Revolution. Its openly expressed dissatisfaction with and opposition to the Cultural Revolution showed that it was now permissible to re-examine this topic. The journal Fine Arts included a discussion of Maple and people began to express skepticism about accepted ‘truths’ and to express concern for an abstract concept of human nature. In September, the mural painting titled Water-sprinkling Festival: A Song in Praise of Life (Poshuijie: Shengming de zange) by a team led by Yuan Yunsheng, which had been commissioned by Beijing’s Capital Airport, alarmed people because of its near nudity and sparked off an extensive public debate. In September, the suppression of the first non-government exhibition of modern art, organized by the Stars group, which was to have been outside the China Art Gallery in Beijing, led to a street demonstration which alarmed spectators because banners in the parade called for ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’. None of these events had anything directly to do with Fang Lijun in Handan, but they formed the background of the new social reality which Fang and his young fellow students would soon be able to savor.
After entering the Hebei School of Light Industry, Fang Lijun did, however, have the opportunity to understand the gradually spreading modernist art. In March, an awards presentation brought to a close a nation-wide exhibition of fine arts held to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Among the successful works which won awards were Cheng Conglin’s Snow on an Unrecorded Day in 1968(1968 nian X yue X ri xue), Gao Xiaohua’s Why (Weishenme) and Wang Hai’s Spring (Chun). These three oil paintings also received prizes in the second category, but it was surprising that these three emotionally laden, grey works won prizes at all at an official art exhibition, because their subject matter was a blatant indictment of the ‘fascist dictatorship’ of the Cultural Revolution period, when of course they would have been condemned. Within an amazingly short time, Fang Lijun acquired knowledge of the new art and could see the new attitude to history presented in Scar Art works. Works and articles by students from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, including Luo Zhongli, He Duoling, Cheng Conglin, Zhang Xiaogang, Zhou Chunya and Ye Yongqing, might not yet have made the leap into ‘modernist art language’, but the authentic feelings expressed in the works and their appeal, together with Scar Art, and the largely south-western Native Soil (Xiangtu) and Life-stream (Shenghuoliu) art trends, exemplified by Chen Danqing’s paintings of Tibetans, helped nurture a sense of the allure of realism in the precocious young Fang Lijun. Subjected to all these influences and sensations while still at technical high school, Fang Lijun found that the new works seen on paper interwoven with the colors and symbols with which he was familiar and in his subconscious mind a complex new inner world was taking shape.
In 1982 Fang Lijun went with a friend on a painting field trip to Shexian county in the Taihang Mountains of southern Hebei, where the austere scenery readily invokes the purity of nature depicted in the Native Soil and Life-stream paintings, and later he completed the series titled Country Love (Xianglian) and No Title (Wuti), directly inspired by the environment and people of this poor mountainous area. The watercolor series titled Country Love was influenced by the fashionable styles of the day, but the purity of the natural environment was the important element for Fang Lijun, not because of the glamour of the ‘native soil’ genre, but because it satisfied his craving for unpolluted purity. The warm emotions that verge on melancholy in the composition of Country Love #2 (Xianglian zhi er) reveal a tendency to truth in this graduate student who also revealed a capacity to dissemble. He successfully entered these works in the Sixth National Fine Arts Exhibition, which must have boosted his confidence. Lying in wait for later use, the rocks in these paintings have a subconscious relationship with his later ‘shaved heads’.
Reading Western books was a popular pursuit among young people in the 1980s. In Fang Lijun’s reminiscences, we see few references to reading post-modern works or abstruse theoretical modernist works. The books he most fondly remembers reading tend to be classics and works of the enlightenment period:
Among the things that influenced me, I’d especially like to mention particular books: Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Rousseau’s Confessions, Victor Hugo’s Ninety-Three, Irving Stone’s Lust for Life and Isadora Duncan’s My Life.I encountered these at a time in life when I most needed them. Wuthering Heights is about three sisters who lead secluded lives in rural England, but have powerful imaginations and overwhelming emotions that come from inside them, and this book taught me that real life is experienced from the heart. A fool might manage to carry out all sorts of exploits but if these don’t impact on his feelings then he’s not even alive. In Confessions Rousseau describes how he raised a young girl on behalf a friend, with the idea of using her when she grew up. But as the years passed, genuine feelings of father and daughter developed between them, and finally the father found that he was unable to use her for his originally intended purposes. Rousseau did not conceal his thoughts but spoke unabashedly. The pure language of the book conveyed the impurity of his thoughts and he became completely transparent. The book taught me about human nature, self-respect and people’s rights. Isadora Duncan’s autobiography related an ideal of artistic freedom and its expression which I found very moving. Whenever I took up my brush to paint, I always wondered whether I wasn’t like that child in the book who wears the white tunic and dances in front of the blue stage backdrop. Whenever I’m thinking about some problem, those powerful books come to mind.[4]
Comparing this passage with Fang Lijun’s cynical retort about the bastard being duped, we can see that later he was deeply pained. Cultural intelligence is a constant, and this constancy conforms to an instinctive ethics. A particular environment can force people to not require this general moral sense or goodness, and compel them to submit to a common will serving an external goal or abstract ideal, so that constancy, ethics and goodness no longer exist. When Fang Lijun had the opportunity to read those books from which he gained so much, he not only increased his knowledge, but affirmed his own innate purity. Given Fang Lijun’s rich harvest, why do we need to understand this abstruse philosophical concept? There is no documentation telling us that Fang Lijun had any interest in abstract philosophical works, but Chinese modernist artists born in the 1950s were filled with these ideas in the 1980s.
Sliding towards extreme hostility often results from not being empowered to use social resources for self-protection. As a child, Fang Lijun did not have the courage to oppose people shouting out denunciations, and he could only watch on silently, releasing the pressure through games of fighting. He was unable to say that what he wanted was the truth, so he had to get approval and sympathy by feigning tears, demonstrating that falseness was the ultimate attainment that elicited enthusiasm. At the specialist high school, the school discipline held his freedom in check and he could not oppose the rules of the school. The boys could not grow their hair over their ears, so he and his classmates simply shaved their heads, thoroughly and neatly implementing the rules. This was a type of resistance that compromised his freedom, and this self-denial entailed new efforts to assert his freedom. It also represented a way of understanding and coping with difficulties in life. When this behavior becomes ingrained, it can result in an outburst of memories and emotions that are difficult to erase, and for Fang Lijun memory and outbursts are simultaneous: ‘From that time onwards, the image of the shaven head, in my subconscious, took on the meaning of rebelliousness and sarcasm’. By ‘subconscious’ he means ‘memory’, while rebelliousness and sarcasm were his outbursts.
He completed Country Love when he was working at the Handan City Advertising Agency, and in 1984 Fang Lijun also traveled to Nanjing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, where he visited the Sixth National Fine Arts Exhibition, resigning soon afterwards from his job at the advertising agency. In 1985, he began his studies in the Print-making Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. At the academy, the serious teaching in the school and the New Wave art taking shape outside created an atmosphere in which Fang Lijun could study and move freely, savoring the freedom he now enjoyed. With his classmates, he could indulge in reading, studying and living as he chose. At the academy he had the conditions to draw on many resources and the opportunities to think, make choices and practice his own art. By 1998, Fang Lijun was creating his first works with the shaved head theme. These were sketches, although people could see that the sketching did not have much to do with the Chistyakov method taught at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. The round and smooth treatment was far removed from the square and structural treatment emphasized at the academy.
In February 1989, Fang Lijun sent his sketches to the China Art Gallery for inclusion in the China Avant-Garde exhibition, but they attracted virtually no attention. This belated gathering of modernists was chaotic and confused, and people were too distracted by sensationalist artworks and the ‘gunshot incident’ to appreciate at their leisure the works hanging on the walls. Most importantly, from the beginning of the political movement opposing ‘bourgeois liberalization’ in 1987, the internal strength of modernism had begun to decline, exposing the problem of essentialism, but the social confusion of 1988 buried this issue and it was only with the opening of the China Avant-Garde exhibition that it became clear that post-modernism, the rejection of the words and actions of essentialism, had already made its appearance. Works at the exhibition, such as Wang Guangyi’s Mao Zedong, Wu Shanzhuan’s Selling Prawns (Mai xia), Li Shan’s Washing Feet (Xi jiao) and Zhang Nian’s Incubating Eggs (Fu dan), as well as the anonymous Threatening Letter (Konghexin) and Condom (Biyuntao), were roped off, shepherding people towards the performance art of Xiao Lu and Tang Song, which gave some critics cause for concern. Fang Lijun’s ‘shaved head’ did not relate to the use of metaphysical concepts by Ding Fang, Shu Qun and Mao Xuhui, and Fang Lijun was not part of the ’85 New Wave, but he was preparing to enter their ranks. His ‘shaved head’ that originated in his own ‘local color’ (xiangtu) had now been exhibited to avant-garde critics, but it had not aroused sufficient interest. Fang Lijun seems to have had little confidence in himself: ‘[The shaved head] was consciously painted, and in imagining a whole scene, like the realist depiction of the countryside of Shexian county, the shaved head, repeatedly placed on the figures, was an experiment with a number of elements, but it did not change things because I lacked the confidence to give it full play’.[5] Clearly, whether or not the ‘shaved head’ later had an impact, at that time Fang Lijun did not think his art had any use for it.
After the political events of 1989 shocked the world, how did a person cope when violence to which one cannot respond is played out again before one’s eyes? In his subconscious, Fang Lijun has already recorded experiences of encountering violence, and now he had seen the failure of resistance with his own eyes. Whether or not essentialist opposition has the ability to effect a theoretical consolation, in his heart he found a natural way to make a concession by giving the nod to resistance. He knew from experience that an individual’s strength is negligible and that an individual has no option but to save himself. This was not the time to discuss right and wrong and it was even difficult to clarify the facts on each side; this was a macroscopic issue that went way beyond the individual. His instincts demanded that he take care of himself, and at that time had already taken begun to rush about and plan a course of action. That was all that he could do. So, in July, he moved into a garden studio ‘covering one mu of land’ between Yuanmingyuan and Yiheyuan, the grounds of the old and new Summer Palaces. Life was inexpensive and he could get on with finishing his sketches and working on his first oil paintings. When he was forced out of there on New Year’s Day of the following year, he moved to the farming village of Guajiatun. During that year, he and some friends (Yu Tianhong, Chen Hong, Tian Bin and Yang Maoyuan) thought up a way of making a living by selling postcards and drawing educational illustrations used by the army. In summer, he managed to find a secure studio space in Yuanmingyuan, where he completed his black-and-white oil paintings titled The First Group (Diyi zu).
Fang Lijun then began to regress, and felt that after the events of 4 June 1989 he had an ‘unrestrained rambling feeling’, enervation brought on by his failure to oppose what he witnessed. In his earlier sketches, he had been instinctively led by his subjects, which were pure scenery and peasants (Sketch #2, 1988). At that time, he naively delineated the teeth of his pure peasants, using repetition to stress their charming simplicity, with just the slightest hint of well-meaning ambiguity and cunning. But he felt that he was not making a clear statement, even though the characteristics of his life accorded with his natural instinct. He instinctively felt the need to avoid anxiety and depression, and find salvation. At times, he placed his figures at staggered distances, as in Oil Painting #3 (Youhua zhi san, 1989-1990), but examining that uncanny scene in the gloomy environment, he does not seem to have achieved his purpose. From 1989 to 1990, in his sketches and color works a girl wearing glasses appears, in Oil Painting #4 (Youhua zhi si) and No Title (Wuti), and this is possibly the documentation of his own emotional life, because we can also see him clearly in the works. In Sketch #4 (Sumiao zhi si), the artist exaggerates the dimensions of the girl in the foreground, and this aggressively exaggerated perspective creates the effect that he is calmly standing to one side waiting for her. However, in the composition we can see repeated images of what might be farmers from the Taihang Mountains following the artist, which might of course represent the inclusion of a fond memory in the composition. However, he has emphasized the image of the shaved head in the sketch, because it makes a strong impression; he thus includes a hint of ambiguity that tempers the mood of the work, distancing it from the depression that had been so fashionable in modernist art. He repeats a single head, and repetition is a technique for emphasizing emotional uniqueness. These elements frequently appear in later paintings, and enlarging an image is another technique he uses. By the time he completed Sketch #5 (Sumiao zhi wu), Fang Lijun was placing his figures against more expansive backgrounds. The appearance of the image of Tiananmen and the sense of agoraphobic ‘unrestrained rambling feeling’ that he had recently experienced may have signaled that he had completely broken away from stone walls of the Taihang Mountains. If one could break away from the confined, concrete environment, in any case, one could open up the door in one’s heart unhindered. Fang Lijun combines his own rebelliousness, the images of peasants in the Taihang Mountain and his stance at a remove from modernism, and begins to remove the superfluous details in his paintings and comes up with a new plan with a brand-new image. Rapidly, by Oil Painting #4 (Youhua zhi si, 1991), Fang Lijun had determined his future direction. According to Fang Lijun, the importance of this work was that he had now made the choice that the shaved head was a totally new beginning, and soon afterwards, following a brief experiment with a batch of black-and-white oil paintings, he resolved some technical problems presented by oil painting, and had embarked on a typical series of paintings.
In March 1991, the critic Li Xianting began categorizing the works of Liu Xiaodong, Fang Lijun, Liu Wei, Wang Jinsong and Song Yonghong together, and coined the term Cynical Realism to describe them. In 1992 Michaela Raab and Francesca Dal Lago held a preliminary showing of a joint exhibition of Liu Wei and Fang Lijun, and Hans Van Dijk included Fang Lijun’s work in the Chinese Avant-Garde Art Exhibition he was curating, for which Li Xianting wrote the catalogue essay explaining the new artistic phenomenon. In it he introduced Fang Lijun’s work:
Fang Lijun’s selected slices of accidental, mediocre and boring incidents from life form the first layer of his distinctive artistic language; the second comprises the totally shaved heads, which form the core of his artistic characteristics, by expressing the notion of the scoundrel (popi) from which much else flows. For the third stage, he places his non-poetic images of ennui against a backdrop of poetic blue skies, white clouds and the ocean, to create an atmosphere of absurdist fantasy. He graduated from the Print-making Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1988, where he acquired a good grounding in the basic skills of sketching. Oil painting was not his specialization, but its techniques suit his psychology and temperament, and by painting in an advertising poster style that emphasizes neutrality and non-expression he has achieved a cool and detached atmosphere in his work. His colors are also not like those of oil painting, and the contrast between the pork-flesh pink and the other colors convey a non-life and non-living feel that also enhances the absurdist fantasy of his works.[6]
The works titled Series (Xielie) painted in 1990-1991 follow the path of Cynical Realism, and in them a bored person yawns and stares indifferently, further recalling Li Xianting’s analysis of questions related to these works:
Almost all sensitive artists face the same existential problem. When the reality of survival results in the loss of the meanings provided by the various cultural and value modes of the past, they are governed by the powerful meaning system of the environments in which they live and do not change and adapt to the loss. In handling this dilemma, the popi (scoundrel, ruffian or hooligan) artist is basically different from the two generations of artists who preceded him, in that he does not believe in any governing system of meaning, not does he believe in making the empty effort to construct new forms of meaning with which to confront reality. He chooses instead to be more sincere and truthful in confronting his own hopelessness. You can’t save anyone but yourself, and the sense of ennui is the strongest method used by the popi artists to dissolve the shackles of meaning. Moreover, when reality failed to provide any new spiritual background, non-meaningful meaning became their automatic choice for giving new meaning to their existence and art, providing the best path for self-salvation. [7]
Li Xianting was pointing out a genuine historical situation. Through his own emotional state and mode of expression, Fang Lijun was also depicting the emotional state at this time of Chinese society, especially residents of Beijing, and anyone familiar with the changes in the literature of this period will recognize that the emotions which Fang Lijun’s paintings evoke are similar to those elicited by Wang Shuo’s novel Don’t Treat Me as a Person (Bie ba wo dang ren). When people understand and acknowledge Fang Lijun’s art, they also begin to understand what Fang Lijun means by being ‘unwilling to be fooled by the same old trick’.
Confronting his own powerlessness, Fang Lijun rationally adopted his own tactics, opening up the world by having allowed himself to become the world, as the artist Qiu Zhijie commented in 1993: ‘Every cage locks the outside world outside’.[8] Although such an attitude lacks reference to a starting point, the artist from the beginning was instinctively, and even possibly, only able to confront his own problems. By keeping a shaved head throughout his life and by expressing a lack of identity through the use of the image of the figure with the shaved head in his paintings, he seems to have achieved a unified identity so that art becomes a portrayal of life and life becomes a part of art. Fang Lijun’s later works all developed along this path. After eliminating detail, Fang Lijun wanted to further realize his own ideas, and he explained many years later why he continued to repeat the motif of the shaved head:
For me, the importance of the shaved head is that it cancels out the concept of the individual, showing the concept of the entire person, and that can be enhanced. In art history, few artists have moved a generalized person to the front of the stage, but the quantity of such generalized persons fills the universe.[9]
Fang Lijun was rapidly attracting attention, and Hans Ulrich Obrist included him in the China Contemporary Art Exhibition in Berlin’s House of World Cultures. In 1993 he took part in the China Post-1989 Exhibition staged by Li Xianting and Johnson Chang Tsong-zung in Hong Kong; in the same year Achill Bonito Oliva visited Fang Lijun’s studio and invited him to the Venice Biennale. Time magazine in the US published a large photograph of Fang Lijun at work, while New York Times Magazine published his Series 2, #2 (Xilie er zhi er). He began to visit European galleries that Chinese artists were eager to see in Spain, Italy, Germany and France, and to be baptized into Western art for the first time. He experienced the joy that comes with success, and even if Western art styles were not all to his taste, he could savour the grand banquet of art.
A commitment by the Communist Party of China to the continuing development of the market economy was provided in Deng Xiaoping’s speech of 1992 following his southern inspection tour. More significantly, Deng also announced that people who maintained after 1989 that capitalism was dangerous should no longer concern themselves with the differences between socialism and capitalism, because ‘economic development is the supreme principle’. In a one-party system, it only requires a statement from the leader with real prestige and influence to change the political and social atmosphere, and even the pattern of history. The core of what became known as the ‘southern inspection tour speech’ was that ideological disputes were nonsensical, and if the national economy were not rapidly stabilized and developed, China and her people were doomed. Stifled debate benefits no-one, but for people who regarded discussion as beside the point, this was tantamount to emancipation. This dissolution of the government’s ideological rationale was somewhat akin to the post-modern critique of modernism: Could the quest for essentialism have ever been successful? Could the interrogation of essentialism have ever really had results? Fang Lijun and some other artists were asking whether freely moving our hands and feet, freely breathing the air, freely laughing, freely staring or freely slapping ourselves and yawning was permissible behavior in our own space? Could such behavior be attacked? The image of the guy with the shaved head and the bored expression could be interpreted as a satire of the system, and were we to attempt to identify who among the artist’s friends or which other artists served as models for the figures in the works, our analysis of that cramped historical context would reveal that self-mockery was the real meaning of Fang Lijun’s works in that period. Given that the artist imagined his own personal space to be the true realm of freedom, he would have been unable to respond to reality by escaping. When his Series 2, #2 (1991- 1992) was featured on the cover of Time in 1993, the model for the yawning figure with the shaved head was Fang’s friend Yu Tianhong, and the ideological caption read: ‘Can this roar save China?’ In 1993, Western countries had little confidence in China’s future, suspecting that a total crisis was imminent. Westerners seemed to see that massive ‘yawn’ as a question mark, but few realized that it was equivocal and could be interpreted in many different ways.
The critic Li Xianting later attempted to find the historical support for this ‘equivocal culture’ (liangke wenhua):
Cynicism (wanshi) and rogue humor (popi youmo) are forms of spiritual self-liberation, and are not merely signifiers of the Post ’89 period. They can even be regarded as the traditional modus operandi of the Chinese intellectual, of which many examples can be found in Chinese history, especially times of political oppression. The literati of the Wei-Jin period posed with all of the self-mockery of crazed scholars, and their untrammeled personal lives served as a counterweight to the heavy political pressure brought to bear on them and as a path for achieving their goals of self-liberation. The famous Wei-Jin masterpiece New Anecdotes and Worldly Tales (Shishuo xinyu) contains countless examples. In the section of that work titled ‘Untrammeled craziness’ (Rendan pian), we read: ‘Liu Ling would invariably drink too much and lose control. Once at a gathering at his house he ripped off all his clothes and became the object of mockery. Liu Ling shouted: ‘Heaven and earth is my home, and the walls of this room are my clothes, so what are you lot doing down my pants?’ The Wei-Jin scholar Ruan Ji proclaimed, ‘What do the Confucian rites have to offer to our generation?’
If we peruse the dramatic lyrics (sanqu) of Yuan dynasty, we find many poems filled with the spirit of roguish self-mockery. The dramatist Guan Hanqing wrote: ‘I am the leader of the lunatics. For most of my life I’ve done willows and buds, slept with willows and moved with the plants’. Zhou Zhongbin wrote: ‘You ask why I call a deer a horse and a phoenix a chicken? Well, I’m as confused as everyone else about just what is the truth’. Liu Shizhong wrote: ‘The floating life is a meaningless rave, achievement’s absurd, as is fame’. The Ming dynasty writer Shen Kua in his Notes from Dream Stream (Mengxi bitan) described the compositions of these Yuan lyricists as ‘satirical, roguish works’, and the Ming writer Sun Daya in his Preface to the Anthology of the Pipes of Heaven (Tianlai ji xu) described the Yuan lyricist Bai Pu as ‘a cynical lout’.
These few examples serve to illustrate that the freewheeling rogue spirit expressive of ennui and nihilism is a stance adopted throughout ancient history by Chinese intellectuals seeking to escape from political darkness. It is no accident that a similar stance should resurface in the modern period in the scholarly writings of Lin Yutang and in the artistic philosophy of rogue humor in the 1990s. Even in the formation of the ‘Laughing Buddha’ interpretation of the image Maitreya Buddha and its popularization for a mass following, we can see that the cynical spirit had entered the marrow of the Chinese; ‘open your mouth to laugh at the people who can laugh; your big belly can accommodate all the inequalities of the world’. From Maitreya to Fang Lijun’s paintings we can see the spirit of the rogue, and I detect a connection.[10]
But it was the rejection of attack that provided Fang Lijun and other Cynical Realist painters and the Political Pop of Wang Guangyi and others with a strength for speculation that could go in either direction: The former emphasized the self-sufficiency of the individual while the latter called for a rearrangement of historical images and contemporary symbols. Together they represented the elimination of the standpoint of essentialism, and they paved the way for the later Gaudy Art and the open appropriation of historical pictorial resources.
In 1993, Fang Lijun began to make water one of the most important elements in his paintings, although we can see water in some works from as early as 1989-1990. In two of his No Title works, we can clearly see the ocean, although the mood of the work depicting the young girl seems romantic, but the composition with the two raised arms seems to be a more unusual emotional record. In the paintings titled Series 1, water in irresistibly introduced among the pictorial elements in Series 1: #3, #4and #7 (1990-1991), and in the eleven works of Series 2, the shaved head of the artist now appears in the water and the woman serves as an allure.
In 1998, in a talk introducing his work to students, Fang Lijun said that in a reply to a question about the reasons for the shaved head and the water in Oil Painting #4 (Youhua zhi si) said:
This work is especially important works for me, because at that time I needed to make a choice between the shaved head, and the more interesting water. But while water was more interesting, the visual effect might not have been as strong, not strong enough to attract interest in a younger painter, and there was also a problem of sequencing. I finally decided to first paint the shaved head and, to make the symbol striking, I left the feeling of the water in the later work. Besides, at that time the Print-making Department did not encourage oil painting, but painting water was technically slightly more difficult subject matter.[11]
However, as traditional texts explain, the symbolic properties of water are more difficult to understand. For Fang Lijun, water presented a predicament resulting from his memory of nearly drowning when he went into a swimming pool as a primary school child and this even was embedded in his subconscious: ‘The pool was several meters deep, and I suddenly panicked and didn’t know how I’d get back out. The incident had a big impact on me and it was only when I was in the second and third years at college that I felt comfortable swimming and was able to appreciate the many meanings of the rippling waves’. Being able to control his fear of water enabled him to enjoy himself and feel free in water, and when water appears in his paintings as the sea, this symbolizes the inner expansiveness and freedom that the artist mentioned. By 1993, Fang Lijun was able to feel completely confident about going into the water and he savored a real sense of freedom. Of course, to begin with, Fang Lijun had technical concerns, because he had become acquainted with David Hockney’s special understanding of how to depict water, and he was most concerned about depicting water with too little force or too simply. He made the shaved head the major leitmotif of his style and he was more hesitant about depicting water:
Later I thought it through. Firstly, Hockney’s water was too simple for Chinese sensibilities but, secondly, if I was afraid of replicating him then this was losing a chance to develop.[12]
He told his audience that art work was like taking a train. Although on the train at first there were passengers going to different places, as the journey continued, everybody would get off at different stops. So, an artist should never feel concerned about not attaining his own goals. Fang Lijun’s ideas on the relationship between artistic styles and originality were quite different from those of Wang Guangyi and others who saw the possibilities of ‘originality’ in Gombrich’s notion of ‘pictorial revision’ first articulated in the late 1980s. However, they all acknowledged the importance of taking trouble over these connections, whether subject matter or method. Fang Lijun was quickly able to handle the use of water as a theme in his compositions. In 1993, the artist was happy; he could now dive into water, had mastered the use of the underwater camera to observe people swimming, and his underwater paintings were well received. Water is a simple material, but its meanings are ambiguous and many. In ancient Chinese political philosophy, water (the people) could either sink or support a boat (the government). The Taoists believed that there was no stronger or more permanent material than water. No force can resist the advance of water that is about to buffet obstacles or go around them, spreading in all directions. This is basically how Fang Lijun instinctively understood the properties of water, and this understanding runs through his works. He was therefore confident that people would not draw pointless comparisons between him and Hockney. Of course, for people who regard water as dangerous and for whom floating on water is synonymous with perilous depths, Fang Lijun’s inner world might sometimes produce unease and concern and his depiction of water at this time was not necessarily a good omen. In fact, Fang Lijun’s water contains complex elements: freedom, crisis, taking things philosophically, a sense of suspension, sexual love, etc. At this time, we can recall his early work No Title (Wuti, 1984) in which a mystifying aura of light and lines suggesting waves contained the sense of limitless, profound and unending emotions. Later, we see that such emotions were combined with an abstracted aura from which endless figures and flowers emerge as though from a future rainbow.
Early in Series 2, #8 (1991- 1992) we could see faces wreathed in warm emotions and a female figure in cotton that replicated his earliest coupling of a folkloric attitude and sexual desire (although the motifs on the clothing of the girl in Series 2, #10 are not very much in this vein). The patterns on the clothing of the girl are painted meticulously, making it clear that the ‘flowers’ have a symbolic function. Flowers opening to various degrees appear in a lot of works produced in 1993, and they float in a beautiful but somehow evil way in the compositions. People born in the 1950s and 1960s are familiar with the images of flowers associated with the ‘motherland’ and this shaped their historical memory. In 1993, some chance event may have led Fang Lijun to begin using flowers, whether fresh, large, blooming or floating, to enhance the libertine and crude image of the shaved head. However, if we look at the way in which he continued to use flowers and combine them with the image of the red scarf, we realize that the ‘flower’ had complex associations for Fang Lijun. Like water, the meaning of flowers is something in his subconscious that goes back to childhood, and in 1998, when introducing his work titled 1993.1 (not surprisingly painted in 1993) Fang Lijun said:
This comes from our education, and from childhood we were taught that something with lots of fresh flowers was happiness. For a long time I was not sure why I was always painting flowers and was particularly interested in flowers. I painted these works at a very early date, much earlier than the Gaudy Art that Li Xianting talks about. I remember how when I was at the technical middle school and was studying porcelain art in Tangshan, we used to do still-life paintings of flowers. The teacher taught us how to color them and make them attractive. When we were in class one day there was a parade outside, with vehicles and crowds. Listening, we then heard gunshots not far from when we were. During the recess, we ran over to the place, but there was no one there, but the bank of the river was stained with blood. We used to sketch at the earth emplacement there, but we never knew what the emplacement was for, until one day we discovered that executions took place there, close to the school. That may have been why I painted flowers, because when the teacher was showing us how to apply beautiful colors to make the flower attractive, someone was being executed outside the classroom window. Perhaps that person should have died, but perhaps he shouldn’t. In any case a life came to an end.[13]
In daily life, a blooming flower does not correspond to death. In the early years of socialist memories, fresh flowers, beauty and hope were inextricably connected symbols, with unquestionable ideological characteristics. Fang Lijun decided to take the meaning of flowers to the extreme and to emphasize their absolute gaudiness. The care and hope once lavished on beautiful flowers were now taken one step further by the artist, so that the flowers, whose inner truth was once suspect, are now juxtaposed with smiling faces and the boundless ocean, thereby becoming empty and hypothetical.
Fang Lijun’s oil paintings of flowers were shown at the Venice Biennale of 1993, and he and other Chinese artists began to become internationally known. For contemporary Chinese artists, the 1993 Venice Biennale was a symbolic turning point and it was clear that the admission of Chinese artists to the international community held great promise for the future, although this was questioned by some critics who called artists’ attention to ‘post-colonial culture’ and warned them about allowing their art to become a tactical tool of Western ideology. However, it was this event that made Fang Lijun one of the most representative Chinese artists in the Western social artistic system. Apart from the reasons of style and originality that won Western critical approval for Fang Lijun’s modeling, colors, skill, technique and aesthetic attitude, another important reason why Fang Lijun won approval for the images of a particular period was that his work was perfectly suited to the basic rules of the ideological game played between East and West in the post-Cold War era, whether serious or ad hoc, political or aesthetic, academic or commercial, individual or corporate. After the Biennale, Fang Lijun participated in many other international exhibitions.
Dissatisfied with the working conditions, rowdiness and distractions at Yuanmingyuan, Fang Lijun and some other artists decided to change their working and living environments. In the winter of 1993, Fang Lijun, together with Zhang Huiping, Yue Minjun and Liu Wei, moved to a studio in Xiaopu village in Songzhuang, Tongxian county. The decision to move also marked the end of their Bohemian lifestyle, but the change in working conditions did not necessarily mean gains in their art, just a change in their living environment. Their earlier experience had, however, given them confidence and room to think. From 1995 onwards, Fang Lijun had begun to experiment with print-making, his specialization at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. For Fang Lijun, the print only offered possibilities in materials and methods, and possibly did not have visual impact of oil painting, but this did not preclude the form from yielding new results. He retained the shaved head and the water in large-dimensional works which would have visual impact; he used an industrial power saw and black, white and grey compositions within a controlled experiment in a gentle and aesthetic range. Because of an open understanding of the print and calmer use of the tools, he succeeded in preserving the unique formal interest of the print, although, to a great extent, the print experiment was only an attempt to expand possibilities and enhance experimentation in art work.
Until 1997, Fang Lijun was thinking about how to develop his art from its existing basis. He experimented with many changes. He concealed figures in the water, allowing them occasionally to surface. The problem is that whether we observe images from within the water or see images going under the water from outside, it is very difficult for us to see the images accurately. The changes created by the movement and depth of the water remove the clarity of distance, and in different lighting our vision feels blurred. The impression created by our vision can influence our mood, because the things we see induce lateral thinking. Fang has described experiments he began in 1996 on works related to memory and forgetfulness. The starting point was, if the images of characters were treated in a fuzzy manner, would this raise temporal questions? To begin with, the artist felt that a golden environment came closest to temporal issues, and the colored skies in the works of 1997 recalled the No Title and Country Love works of 1984, the difference being that tender feelings after more than a decade no longer have the ornamental auras of light or the local rural color. In 1997.4 and 1997.5, it is very difficult for us to judge whether the images floating in water are today’s adults or yesterday’s children. Fang Lijun was now experimenting with images above and below the water, with black-and-white and color, and with oil painting and wood-block prints. In a very short period of experimentation that he had not undertaken for many years, he had succeeded in being able to directly achieve the effects he wanted. He hoped to find a starting point in his works for more abstract problems, and through his glittering fuzzy images he was attempting to tell us: When today we face the memory of yesterday, we cannot guarantee that the basis determining today’s outcome will appear. The result of this logic is that in some fuzzy compositions, we can see definite key elements, such as the shaved head and the water; we can even see the change in interest in the yellow sky that fills the composition, but can we really link the artist’s starting point with the resulting works?
The actual content of looking for memory comes out in some works of 1998. In 1998 Untitled (1998 wuti) and 1998.8.10, a red scarf has appeared. Most of the images are not of adults, but adolescents wearing red scarves. Using the image of bare headed teenagers can be interpreted as the artist’s memory of his own past, and if they are accompanied by flowers as they shout and jump for joy, we might easily confirm their time and temporal context. On the basis of the red scarf and flowers, we might want to interpret the work (1998.8.10) regarded by Time magazine as a ‘roar as today’s personal memory of yesterday. In such works, was the artist finding it difficult to explain the relationship between everything about yesterday and today? What is the historical relationship between the red scarf and flowers? In recovering such historical signifiers and even placing the images of today in the background, the interpretation of memory acquires many possibilities. More importantly, in the process of the development of his compositions the artist made a problematic about-turn; by using the red scarf to reduce the scenes of jubilation and the floating flower petals to a relationship between today and yesterday expressed through the composition, the audience can make any number of interpretations of the work because the composition is fuzzy.
Those born in the 1950s and 1960s would have seen many colored balloons at National Day, commemorating major political events and special celebrations, as countless ideals and reveries rose into the sky, but all that color was a part of ideological activities, which with constant repetition and emphasis became an eternal memory for a generation and eventually several generations. Fang Lijun, by placing ascending fresh flowers in his compositions, triggered people’s memories and, in order to recover the nature of these memories, he not only emphasized the children looking skywards, but even depicted them ascending into the heavens. As a result, the artist not only induces us look up at the sky more often but leads us into the clouds (2000.1.10, 2002.1.3 and 2002.2.15) and to very high mountain peaks (2002.6.4 and 2004.1.2). Finally, after the question of memory is put behind us, and before the artist has altered his planned ascension, he calls on those who have already reached the sky to look down together with him to the world below. We see that the artist has proposed another abstract question and what is different from the situation several years previously is that now he is offering a new composition and worldview. By 2005, the artist had reconstructed happiness in a sea of clouds, eliminated the red scarf and retained the images of adolescents shouting and jumping for joy in a boundless sea of clouds, but without pointing to any actual meaning; within a definite description this ignorant happiness constructs vast bleakness and emptiness. So, in mood and spiritual content, the artist is perpetuating the early themes of the ‘scoundrel’ and ‘cynic’ inworks completed more than a decade later, except that now the artist is no longer concerned with his everyday mood and is proposing a problem which we all face: What is the relationship between our histories and who we are today? The artist has changed the spatial structure and different visual perspectives to adjust our visual habits and mode of observation, adopting a methodology that makes use of symbolic metaphor in an attempt to demonstrate the concept of time on a level plane:
I twirl the clouds, twist them into a tunnel, a cavity or cavern, and from any point, they are naturalistic, layer upon layer upon layer pushing away. From there, each layer pushes past. The painting can be viewed from any direction, but the clouds hang properly, and transform into something with both space and time. It is easy to construct space in a painting, but you cannot build time, but by twisting the planes to form a cavity I create what can be simply described as a plug-hole. The distance between the person and the plug-hole naturally creates a sense of time. This is not simply a visual concept of space. At this time, people can only ponder and you must change the method; you can’t see a sea of clouds by standing on Mount Tai or see the sunrise by standing on the Pigeon’s Nest at Beidaihe, because these are no longer concepts. The modes of familiar perspective have been altered. The more you cross a section, the more real it is; every section is what you are familiar with and every section matches the perspective with which you are familiar. But put together, they turn into an entirely different structure. [14]
As early as 1996, in a work titled 1996.9, the image of the character is no longer an adult with a shaved head, but a child. The artist has discarded the depiction of the state of existence and has cast his gaze on the initial stage of growing up. In 1997, adolescents appear fuzzily in the golden sea of memory; in 1998, they are resurrected wearing red scarves among flowers and shouting for joy and, by 2000, they have been elevated to the heavens, indicating the strength of ancient ideals.
For Fang Lijun, the depiction of memory was not suggested by literature. He had previously sought it out through his hazy and fuzzy compositions, but if the investigation of painting is only a cultural construct, then seeking clearer forms of expression may open up new possibilities. Fang Lijun had gradually come to cast innocent children as a leitmotif. In this way, the artist could invite us to probe with him not the individual, but questions related to people and life. But, could there be commonality between different stages of life? Could a newborn baby have any questions of experience? The baby appears between two fingers in 2000.1.5, in order to show that he has the conditions to exist; in the water in 2004.6, in order to demonstrate the natural relationship between our lives and water; in the clouds in 2005.8.15, in order to demonstrate that the environment for life is suspect. Sometimes, the artist only wants to extol life, and he places the baby who might be interpreted as purity and cleanliness inside a glittering ring of lights (2005.5.1); sometimes, the artist wants to show that a baby can also encounter the unforeseen (2005.6.4). In fact, the modeling of the baby and the earlier shaved head seem to readily fall into a relationship, but the questions this touches on are somewhat different. Those works that do not depict the cynic or the scoundrel are simply encapsulating the artist in his brand-new mental state: free, open and compassionate.
In utilizing the symbol of the baby, Fang Lijun and Zhang Xiaogang have similarities, and they would both agree that the birth of life is an issue. But Fang Lijun is more willing to emphasize the characteristics of life in a more general environment and he wants to allow its expression to speak; Zhang Xiaogang is intrigued by the dramatic nature of the baby’s environment, and those structures of light with no concrete source pose a specific threat to life. At the beginning, the primitive impulse of life can lead a person to face up to his true state, and this is the reason that gave rise to the ‘scoundrel’, but when real life forces someone to ponder the meaning of his life, a more abstract caring concern will emerge. The fresh flowers are the product of memory, and the heart’s true expectations of life; the baby is the result of happiness as well as being the beginning of the question, and if no life is the product of no contradictions, than even an insect is a valuable symbol of life. In his one-man show in November 2007, a large number of insects, birds and beasts of different species appeared in Fang Lijun’s works, as though the artist wanted to say that the world is not like this: It is very difficult for us to say clearly what among the different lives are important and unimportant; when a baby as a symbol of mankind soars into the sky riding on the back of a bat, no one can distinguish clearly between them. Another work, in which the sun shines dimly in the background, depicts children floating on the ocean in a clump, but where the children are going is not the focus of the question, because the insects all around them pose a threat to their lives. Their expressions seem anxious and terrified, but they are not so tense that they cannot hold themselves in check. If we observe carefully we can see that a tiny angel is flying towards them, which is a lucky omen, but various insects hovering in flight like white cranes show that the artist has not adhered to the criterion of uniqueness in his judgment on the value of life. The history of civilization is filled with stories that praise self-sacrifice for the lives of others, which is to say that grief and misfortune are all relative and can transform. At this exhibition, Fang Lijun used painting, sculpture and installations to display his free and open way of thinking.
From the beginning, Fang Lijun was the kind of artist who took his art style naturally from life, and he even objected to regarding art as the core of life and or as an isolated thing, as he himself explained:
The kind of life you lead will determine the kind of art you create. Otherwise, if you first determine your art, and then determine your life, this won’t make any sense.
Extending such logic, Fang Lijun disagreed that any rules governed art or that art was a concrete form or sacred concept, art being only a possibility and its expression:
Art is something that can’t be regulated. Its allure is that you want to describe it, but it’s impossible for you to want to hold it down. In itself art is nothing. Like a hammer, the hammer’s nothing. It has various uses, some people made a living with it, others are killed by it, and others are protected by it. It only extends possibilities.[15]
Unlike people who in the past interpreted the motives and mythology of artists, Fang Lijun completely eliminated the sacred reverence for the artist, placing artistic questions on a level playing field with all other questions of life:
Some people are artists for money, but an artist who loves money is not necessarily a great artist; some artists may be driven by lust, but such an artist also is not necessarily a great artist. Take Van Gogh. Read his journals and you find he didn’t lead a normal life; he wanted to find a diseased prostitute to have his child, but none were willing, but this did not make him not a great artist.[16]
Such a view derives from a particular view of life and the world; if language could facilitate better communication, we might use the words ‘limited’ and ‘limitless’ to express issues related to art. Regarding our use of the words ‘limited’ and ‘limitless’, Fang Lijun on a popular level is telling us about such vocabulary:
Everything in our lives and space is so small. Facing a world that we are unable to control and unable to completely understand, we feel frightened and always want to be enclosed by a world smaller than ourselves, and so we use various methods to make the world smaller, so that the world is a dish of melon seeds, easy to handle, reassuring, and I am safe.
However, while conclusions perhaps differ about different artists from different observers, Fang Lijun places emphasis on what is regarded as being less important, and focuses on the importance of another neglected aspect and perspective:
The simplest grief and limitations of others are the limitations of your life and range. You have to do things within a limited life and feasible scope. Like those persons you say have lost it, he could be placed in a psychiatric hospital as the focus for research or he could be the focal point in a hospital. If your topic is people forgotten by history, then he could be your focal point. Your perspective and what you do must both be clear.
Such a view means that everybody has his or her own starting point, and there is no reason for regarding this starting point as unimportant or unnecessary. Such views and the art in which the artist was originally engaged eliminated the metaphysical starting point. The important thing was to gain freedom through training, and this in itself is meaning. Indeed, Fang Lijun’s views on ‘freedom’ and his thinking on other matters were closely linked. Although his well-known art stressed individuality and the self, he did not believe that the absolute self existed:
We now speak of the self, but I believe that the self is nonsense. Physically, you had no choice about being born. It wasn’t something you demanded, but was imposed on you; spiritually, you have nothing innate, only what you later acquired. If we placed one infant in Israel and another in Palestine, the former would grow up hating Palestinians and the later hating Jews. So we say that the spirit isn’t yours and you have been duped into a meaningless self. However, though you have no self, you also cannot absolutely deny the self. We say that desire is limitless and the world is limitless, but you would again deny that their pursuit will have no end, otherwise you would be nothing; if you can head off in any direction, then you still could not get it together. In the 1980s we didn’t understand things and we were the products of crazy desires.I could only chase things in all directions, and nothing came of it. I couldn’t make decisions. When we come to 1989, because of our age at the time, it was our fate; you focused all your content, spiritual anger and strength on a concrete goal and then you went to work. This was much easier than the reversal we just mentioned. So-called freedom basically wasn’t possible to achieve but I feel that, with a goal, freedom was more possible. Why? I could attack from the side or from the front, I could grab what was at the top and below, I could go on smiling and get angry, I could pretend it had nothing to do with me, but by having just one goal at this time I was free. Because I was free from methodology. If I if faced the strength of one hundred, I could take precautions against one hundred, but if I only took precautions against one hundred, I was no longer free. There was no point in saying that I would ponder every aspect of the situation, because my strength was not up to it. So our perspective and stance determine our judgments about these things and situations. [17]
Because freedom is limited, Fang Lijun understood that he could gain wider freedom through training, and freedom without training he called ‘uncontrollable freedom’. Such freedom could not result in the real production of art and could even drive you ‘crazy’; as with sprinkling water, ‘the water coming out of the container is free, but you can’t put it back’. Another type of freedom is controllable freedom: ‘Controllable freedom can be acquired through training. So when we talk about the background for creative work, we are talking about the freedom in the 1980s. As for controlled persons, those with the ability to control are free. Persons without this ability cannot find the ground or are at sea, and everything can be gone in an instant. By 1989 and in the 1990s, controllable freedom similarly came into existence. Controllable freedom was a prison. As with prisons made of steel bars and concrete you had no possibilities at all. So I felt that talking about freedom aside from people was untenable. Only by referring to people were there these two possibilities for freedom. And that meant training’.[18] In any case, we can’t say that the problem we face is not a problem, but through training we can avoid and transform the question. After years of training, Fang Lijun demonstrated an understanding that had moved from recording specific personal states to the broader questions of human existence. Speaking from this perspective, Fang Lijun understood the importance of water, and in his comprehension and experience understood how relativity is appropriate in these circumstances and in which kind of environment it might be meaningless. He understands that the individual life is limited, and so he may have only been able to understand what he could about unlimited questions. On the road of realism, there were no methods simpler than the techniques Fang Lijun acquired from advertising: flat and monochrome, with simple turns and outlines. But few other techniques have acquired the complexity of Fang Lijun’s art, which creates oppositions, cannot be reduced to a simple explanation and does not demand choices. In other words, it is neither good nor bad, neither beautiful nor ugly. Fang Lijun has, through his artistic talent, confirmed the relationships that require constant understanding, and he recognizes that, when the artist’s work has created a relationship that can be infinitely extended, the art has reached a particular realm. This view recalls ancient Chinese philosophy, in which for example there is the succinct concept that ‘superior virtue is like water’. It is very difficult to draw a clear line of demarcation around such a terse statement, but it is how ancient Chinese philosophers framed questions, by not requiring circumlocutory explanations of society and life. Differing greatly in his understanding of art, Fang Lijun did not regard art as something completely different from life, and as he saw it, if an individual was willing to do so, he could regard his own life and work as art, if it was necessary to use any term. In his early years, Fang Lijun was a representative of Cynical Realism, and he used classical images to frame questions of history, so that people could find images and symbols of history; later, he removed the barriers of language around his ideas to provide hints about the rationale of life: There are no lives that make one superior to other people, but there is no life that is totally random. As for art, her function is the possibility of opening up life.
Although democracy and equality are intolerably fuzzy concepts, as part of the general knowledge of a particular historical period, people still understand their basic meaning. However, this does not mean that the abilities and intelligence of all living creatures are equal; human existence is advanced by various inequalities, one of the reasons for which is that talents concealed within the structure of a person’s soul and the authority civilized society confers on artists. Fang Lijun reminds us of this question, and he emphasizes that moral qualities and sensitivity should be attributes of the artist:
The artist has an innate advantage: An artist is the only person in society who can be arrogant and swear that he cannot be replaced; in this trade, unlike other trades within the human collective, no one is as arrogant as the artist. On this point, the artist’s success carries with it some preordained superiority. But many people engaged in this trade have not found this a priori superiority for themselves and so they are unsuccessful. All reasonably unsuccessful artists affirm that they have not found their congenital advantage. Other people feel that a lot of us artists are successful because we are stupid and feeble-minded, and because they were the ones who discovered our advantage. The artist can make a vow: I am the only one and I cannot be replaced. Because human nature is applicable to all, no matter how you clamor about how you cannot be replaced, you can be understood. So through such combinations and relationships, a fool can be successful within art circles, but he cannot be successful if he hasn’t realized his own congenital advantage. Certainly, some people theoretically have not realized this, but they do it and they do it blindly, and they too succeed. In fact the profession of the artist is a position that the artist negotiates with mankind. You don’t generally dare to say things and in front of superiors and the system or in various relationships or because of education, religion or ethics, you don’t dare to give vent to the things you think; because of the restraint of words, you do not dare to be the only one like me. You can only imagine yourself as one among six billion other humans. Therefore, all artists’ actions and words somehow represent pan-human aspirations. On this platform, whoever is able to express the wish for something deeper and more immediate will be successful.[19]
We can understand Fang Lijun’s logic in explaining his importance in contemporary art history. In other words, we can feel how he took the path he travelled from his own perspective.
NOTES:
[1]From Wang Jifang, The Last Romantics: Record of the Lives of Beijing’s Free Artists (Zuihou de langman: Beijing ziyou yishujia shenghuo shilu), Beifang Wenyi Chubanshe, 1999.
[2]Pi Li, ‘Conversation with Fang Lijun’ (He Fang Lijun de tanhua).
[3]Li Xianting, B. Doar tr., ‘Fang Lijun and Cynical Realism’ in Tatehata Akira ed., Fang Lijun: Human Images in an Uncertain Age, Tokyo, 1996, p.84.
[4]Chen Hongyun, ‘The Path of Fang Lijun’s Free Spirit’ (Fang Lijun de ziyou xinling zhi lu).
[5]From Xu Kewen ed., Clues (Xiansuo).
[6]Li Xianting, ‘The Sense of Ennui and the Third Generation of Post-Cultural Revolution Artists’ (Wuliaogan he ‘Wenge’ hou de disandai yishujia), First draft, March, 1991.
[7]Li Xianting, ‘The Sense of Ennui and the Third Generation of Post-Cultural Revolution Artists’ (Wuliaogan he ‘Wenge’ hou de disandai yishujia), August 1991.
[8]Qiu Zhijie, ‘Stance’ (Lichang).
[9]Pi Li, op. cit.
[10]Li Xianting, ‘Fang Lijun’s Shaved Head Ruffians’ (Fang Lijun de guangtou popi), 2000; Li Xianting, B. Doar tr., ‘Fang Lijun and Cynical Realism’ in Tatehata Akira ed., Fang Lijun: Human Images in an Uncertain Age, Tokyo, 1996, p.86.
[11]Yin Jinan, ‘Verbal Record of Fang Lijun’ (Fang Lijun de koushu), December 1998.
[12]Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14]Li Xianting, ‘Conversation with Fang Lijun’ (Yu Fang Lijun duihua).
[15]Lü Peng, ‘The Question of Speaking Unwittingly about Art’ (Tuokou yishu wenti), February 2008.
[16]Ibid.
[17]Ibid.
[18]Ibid.
[19]Ibid.
Friday 29 February 2008
Translated by Dr. Bruce Gordon Doar