Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. If you are looking for the artist who viscerally embodies the tension between the individual and the collective in contemporary China, look no further than Fang Lijun. Born in 1963 in Handan, Hebei Province, this man has managed to transform bald heads and grimacing faces into icons of an entire era. He has become, almost despite himself, the standard-bearer of “cynical realism”, a term he never really claimed but which sticks to him like an indelible tattoo.
When the New York Times Magazine featured one of his works on the cover in December 1993, Fang instantly became the embodiment of a new wave of Chinese art. But don’t be fooled, behind his commercial success hides an artist who almost rejected the 90s art market, deeming it imprudent to sell his works at incredible prices. Here is a man who has made refusal a form of art in itself.
His paintings, woodblock prints, and ceramic sculptures are visual punches that hit you right in the solar plexus. His bald characters, repeated ad nauseam, are not just easy-to-market visual signatures. They represent depersonalization, forced conformity, and paradoxically, a subtle form of resistance. It’s as if Fang is telling us: “Here is what we have become, beings without individuality, but beware, we are aware of this loss and it is precisely this awareness that saves us”.
Post-Tiananmen China of 1989 gave birth to artists like Fang, who had to navigate the murky waters of a rapidly changing society. Between political repression and economic openness, these creators found in irony and detachment the only possible responses to a world that was losing its bearings. Fang never claimed to be a revolutionary, that would be too simple and too dangerous. He preferred to be an observer, a witness who transforms his existential malaise into striking images.
Take his monumental work of 2003, initially titled “SARS” then renamed “Untitled”, now exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, MoMA in New York, and the Guangdong Art Museum. Seven panels four meters high filled with faces in flamboyant tones, printed using woodblocks. A traditional Chinese technique revisited to express contemporary malaise. A work so powerful that it transcends its original context to speak to all those who feel overwhelmed by the human mass.
And what about his series of ink portraits, where he captures the essence of his friends in exaggerated, almost caricatural expressions? Far from being mere technical exercises, these works are explorations of individual identity in a country that has long valued the collective over the individual. Fang reminds us that behind every face lies a unique story, even if society tries to erase it.
This is where Fang meets psychoanalysis, this Western science of the individual unconscious that contrasts so sharply with the collectivist ideology of Maoist China. His figures repeated to obsession, his masses of bald heads that stretch out to infinity like a human sea, are not without recalling Freudian analyses on the loss of identity in the crowd. In his masterful work “1991.6.1”, a large woodblock print, a crowd of bald heads stands under a larger head with an anonymous finger pointing to the sky. This powerful image evokes what Freud called the “group psychology”, where the individual abdicates personal judgment to blend into the collective mentality [1].
Pain is at the heart of Fang’s work, as he himself confided: “Once you feel the pain, you realize how precious life is”. This sentence could come straight out of a Lacanian psychoanalysis manual, where the recognition of suffering is the first step towards authenticity. His faces deformed by pain or frozen in forced laughter remind us that beneath the social varnish always lies the raw truth of our human condition.
But Fang is not just a theorist of pain in a white coat. He is also a practitioner of art, a master of diverse techniques ranging from oil painting to woodblock printing to ceramics. It is indeed in this latter medium that he has recently pushed his artistic exploration to the extreme, creating works so fragile that they always seem on the verge of breaking. This fragility is not accidental, it is the exact reflection of what Fang perceives as the modern human condition.
Fang’s transition to ceramics is not trivial. After studying this medium at the Hebei Light Industry School in the 1980s, he returned to it in recent years with a radically different approach. Unlike the Chinese porcelain tradition that values perfection, “only one in 999 pieces is considered successful”, Fang prefers to explore imperfections, cracks, defects. “Why not throw away that perfect piece and keep the 999 imperfect ones?” he wonders, thus overturning centuries of Chinese ceramic tradition.
This approach has provoked the anger of many Jingdezhen craftsmen, the historic center of porcelain in China. But Fang persists, because for him, perfection is boring. He prefers to explore what he calls the “liminal state”, that precise moment when a work could just as well begin as end, like “a person standing at the edge of a cliff”. Is this not exactly what Kierkegaard described as the dizziness of freedom, that existential anguish that grips us in the face of the void of possibilities?
References to existentialist philosophy abound in Fang’s work. His characters always seem to be in a state of waiting, suspended between heaven and earth, neither entirely free nor completely oppressed. They evoke Sartre’s descriptions of being-for-itself, that human consciousness condemned to freedom but always tempted by bad faith. In his paintings where figures drown or float in water, Fang explores what Sartre called “viscosity”, that intermediate state between solid and liquid that symbolizes the bogging down of consciousness [2].
Water is, moreover, a recurrent motif in Fang’s work. He himself explained that “water is very close to [his] understanding of human nature”. Water is liquid, without fixed rules. When you look at it, it changes. Sometimes you find it very beautiful, very comfortable, but sometimes you find it terrifying”. This description irresistibly evokes Bachelard’s analyses of the imagination of water, sometimes maternal and welcoming, sometimes hostile and deadly.
Fang’s work “1995.2”, which shows a bald figure facing the sea, back to the viewer, is particularly emblematic of this ambiguity. No one can say what this character feels. Is it contemplation or despair? Freedom or abandonment? This very indeterminacy is at the heart of Fang’s approach, which refuses easy and unambiguous interpretations.
At heart, Fang Lijun is an artist of paradox. He uses simple and repetitive forms to express the infinite complexity of the human experience. He employs humor and irony to speak about deeply serious subjects. He uses traditional techniques to create resolutely contemporary works. And above all, he manages to be intensely personal while speaking of universal experiences.
His working method itself is paradoxical. While most artists specialize in one medium or style, Fang works simultaneously on several projects using different techniques. “If you do all these works at the same time, you will be particularly aware of the characteristics of each of them, and in which direction you should go”, he explains. This comparative approach allows him to see possibilities that other artists, locked in their specialty, would miss.
It is perhaps this ability to hold opposites together that makes Fang such an important artist for our time. In an increasingly polarized world, where nuances are often crushed by ideological certainties, his work reminds us of the value of doubt, ambiguity, and the in-between. His figures are neither heroic nor pathetic, they are simply human, with all the complexity that entails.
Even his relationship with the “cynical realism” movement is ambivalent. Although he is considered one of its pioneers, he has always maintained a certain distance from this label. “I never really adhered to the term Cynical Realism”, he asserts. This resistance to easy categorization is characteristic of his artistic approach in general.
What makes Fang Lijun’s work powerful is its ability to transcend particular contexts to speak to a broader human experience. Although his early works were born in the specific context of post-Tiananmen China, they resonate today far beyond these initial circumstances. As he himself emphasized: “These feelings are linked between people. No matter where you come from, whether it’s England, the United States, Africa, China, we are all linked by empathy”.
In his recent series of ink portraits of friends, begun during the COVID-19 pandemic, Fang has sought to strengthen human bonds through his art. These portraits do not aim to capture a faithful likeness, but rather to express a feeling, an emotional connection. It is a reminder that art, at its best, is not simply a representation of the world, but a way of relating to it.
Over sixty years old, Fang continues to explore new artistic directions, to push the limits of materials and techniques, to confront fundamental existential questions. His journey, from the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution to international recognition, testifies not only to his personal resilience but also to the capacity of art to transform the experience of suffering into meaningful creation.
Fang has compared his artistic journey to a staircase climb, or rather a march, step by step. This image of gradual progress, without grand dramatic gestures, is revealing of his approach to art and life. There are no sudden revelations, no magical transformations, only a patient engagement with reality in all its complexity. It is perhaps this patience, this perseverance in exploring difficult questions, that makes Fang Lijun such an important artist for our time. In a world that often privileges speed, spectacle, and immediacy, his work invites us to slow down, to look closely, to inhabit the contradictions and ambiguities that are an integral part of our condition.
So yes, you bunch of snobs, if you are looking for easy, seductive art that confirms your prejudices and flatters your ego, move on. But if you are ready to confront deep questions about identity, freedom, the relationship between the individual and society, then Fang Lijun’s work awaits you. It will not offer you simple answers or easy consolations, but something much more precious: a space to think, to feel, and perhaps, just perhaps, to recognize yourself in these bald faces that have been staring at us with disturbing intensity for over thirty years.
- Li Xianting, “Major Trends in the Development of Contemporary Chinese Art”, in China’s New Art, Post-1989, 1993, Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong.
- Fang Lijun, What About Art, 2020, Beijing.
