Fang Lijun

Galerie Serieuze Zaken, Amsterdam
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Executed towards the end of 1989, Fang Lijun's Drawing No. 6 is a rare work dating from the very year that has come to define the landscape for avant garde art in China. In the build up to the devastating events of June 4^th 1989, Fang was preparing his final year submission at the Central Academy of Fine Arts where he was enrolled in the printmaking course, just half a kilometre from Tiananmen Square. In the aftermath of the shootings, the degree class was aborted as the authorities clamped down on anyone who might have been involved. After a decade of opening and reform in China, in which Fang's generation had been offered a glimpse of the independence that engendered individuality and heady idealism, the dictatorial reality was all the more shocking. Fang says: "After graduation I knew what my concerns were and more importantly I knew the approach and techniques required to achieve them. I had decided the work that would occupy me for the next few years: I knew that painting would be my lifelong pursuit". (the artist cited in Pi Li, 'A Dialogue with Fang Lijun' in Hunan Fine Art Press, ed., Fang Lijun, Hunan 2001, p. 37). Renting a simple dwelling from a farmer in the North West of Beijing, he pioneered an embryonic community of likeminded artists who sought safety in numbers. Later known as the Yuanmingyuan artist's village, this community became a hotbed for some of the most talented artists known today. 

In the twelve months after June 4^th, Fang focused on making drawings and it is in these intricate, detailed and highly finished works on paper that his mature style and iconography evolved. In Drawing No. 6 we identify the coterie bald-headed individuals that populate his later works. Unlike the urban ennui of the paintings from the 1990s, however, the sources for Fang's drawing of this time are the farmer-peasants of the Taihang mountain region in the east of Hebei province, where Fang used to visit on field trips to draw from nature. Here engaged in solemn prayer, the virtually indistinguishable, uniformly attired men are etched in subtle cross-hatchings in a simple naturalistic way that shows Fang's grasp of accurately rendered realism, the core tenet of his traditional artistic education. Reminiscent of Country Life Realism that was a dominant and state endorsed genre under the PRC, Fang's melancholic eulogy to the rural farming community is the foundation upon which his trademark parody of contemporary Chinese society would build and one of the works that gave birth to the term 'cynical realism'. With all the elements of his mature style falling into place, these farmers would soon be transformed into the very badge of his disaffected and disenfranchised urban generation. The solemnity of their expressions in Drawing No. 6 would over the next year evolve into the cynical sneers characteristic of Fang's later work. Embodying the sense of disdainful resignation that permeated China's youth post June 4^th, the present groundbreaking work is a landmark in the evolution of the oeuvre of one of the most influential characters to shape modern art within China.