Cultural Revolution, Artistic Evolution : Fang Lijun Gets Creative Impetus From Modern Chinese History

When Fang Lijun was 5 years old, something happened that would shape his life, and his art, forever.

At the time, 1968, China was in the early, most emotional phase of the 10-year Cultural Revolution. Fang was the happy son of a railroad engineer and his wife, living in the sooty, gray northern Chinese city of Handan, Hebei province.

One day, he recalled recently at a restaurant near his studio in the Beijing suburbs, there was a particularly festive air in the railroad workers’ compound where his family lived. Young Red Guards ran between houses urging residents to assemble at the sports stadium. Fang joined the other excited children in the front rows, expecting to be entertained.

The public rally was an all-too-common one in China in those days. Red Guards incited the crowd with chants of “beat the landlord!” as, one by one, supposed class enemies were marched to the stage and forced to wear dunce hats or placards listing their “crimes.” Sometimes the militants flailed their victims or forced them to bend forward and raise their arms behind their backs in the excruciating exercise they called “doing the airplane.”

For the children, it was a kind of theater, a grand game staged by adults for their benefit. Fang said he watched and participated happily until he saw that one of the men being forced to mount the stage was his own beloved grandfather, accused of being a “rich peasant” enemy of the people.

“Beat landlord Fang!” the crowd of 10,000 people shouted.

For grandson Fang, the world was suddenly reduced to a howling, finger-pointing maelstrom. Twenty-five years later, the 30-year-old artist calmly spoke of that moment as his artistic epiphany.

Fang graduated from the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts in the summer of 1989. He was present in the vast square on the night of June 4, 1989, when army units moved into the city to break up the pro-democracy movement. Just as the Cultural Revolution propelled him into becoming an artist, the events of Tian An Men marked the beginning of his artistic production.

Nevertheless, Fang insists his work is not politically motivated. “People always ask me about the political, social and economic basis of my work. But to me it is my job. I get up, go to the studio, paint and go home.”

These days, in fact, Fang is experimenting with a broader range of subjects. His most recent works are large gray oils depicting swimmers. “I like water,” he said. Earlier, he did smiling self-portraits with a female model. Full-blown roses decorate some pictures, floating among unconscious subjects.

But his first works, those best known in the West, are mainly large self-portraits as a finger-pointing accuser or a laughing figure with shaven pate among other bald men who wear what appear to be prison uniforms. His entire oeuvre is about 30 oil-on-canvas paintings ranging from 6 1/2-by-7 1/2 feet to a handful as small as 1 1/3-by-1 feet.

Fang’s vision is from the perspective of a child. What Gunther Grass did for literature with “The Tin Drum”--Nazi Germany viewed from the eyes of a boy--Fang is attempting with his painting.

“It happened just as I was coming of age,” said Fang, a lean smiling man whose shaved head is framed by large elfin ears, translucent as thin candle wax, as he recalled the Handan rally. “I just knew that I loved my grandfather and that he was a good man. It allowed me to understand what people are capable of doing.”

Much has been made of the Cultural Revolution and its profound effects on Chinese art, literature and cinema. Celebrated Chinese movie directors Chen Kaige (“Farewell My Concubine”) and Zhang Yimou (“Raise the Red Lantern”) have both recorded their artistic debt to the tumultuous period.

But the difference between Chen and Fang is that Chen was already grown when the Cultural Revolution occurred.

Fang and his generation were still children during the Cultural Revolution. Because they do not have to wrestle with the demons of their past actions, Fang argues, the new generation has a broader tableau on which to make its art. “I think there is more creative potential for people of my generation,” he said, adding, “but it is impossible to group art by generations.”

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Among his colleagues in the Yuanmingyuan artistic community, Fang is by far the most successful. The colony of new, cheap traditional courtyard style homes not far from Beijing University is now crowded with less-talented artists who blatantly imitate Fang’s style. The congestion in the once-quiet community is such that Fang, assisted by his German wife, Michaela Raab, an international aid worker in Beijing, plans to move his studio in the coming months.

In 1993, Fang’s works were exhibited at the prestigious Venice Biennale and at the Malborough Fine Arts gallery in London, agents for the late Francis Bacon and other noted contemporary modern artists.

“Along with Liu Wei,” said Malborough galleries director Gilbert Lloyd, referring to another 1989 graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts often grouped with Fang in the Cynical Realist school, “I consider Fang Lijun one of the most promising artists in China.”

In 1994, Fang has been invited to participate in the “World Morality” exhibition in the Basel, Switzerland, Kunsthalle, along with 14 other prominent artists and photographers, including Mike Kelley, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Juan Munoz and Pipilotti Rist. Also scheduled is an exhibition of works by Chinese artists in Fukuoka, Japan, and a one-man show in Paris at the Gallerie Bellefroid.

As often happens with successful Chinese artists, Fang’s success overseas has subjected him to criticism at home that he caters too much to an international audience, ignoring the cultural idiosyncrasies of his homeland.

Fang greets this criticism with a broad smile and hearty laugh. “During the Cultural Revolution,” he said, harking back to the familiar theme, “artists had no idea that their works would ever see light. The most we could hope for was that someone might someday make prints and smuggle them out so someone could see it. We never dreamed that we would be exhibited internationally. That makes this kind of criticism seem like nothing.”