Fang Lijun. The Precipice over the Clouds

One of the leading protagonists of Chinese contemporary art, Fang Lijun was born in 1963, three years before the start of the Cultural Revolution. He began to paint at age five and continued to experiment tirelessly with drawing, painting and ink media.
By the early 1990s Fang Lijun was one of the major exponents of Cynical Realism, a term coined by Li Xianting and characterized by a subtle rebellious humor: the word "rebellious"-which in Chinese encompasses the concept of cynicism-signifying that which is jocular, fun-loving, free-wheeling, unrestrained, blasé and capable of seeing through things.
Informed by his personal journey, Fang's art has gradually evolved to create an expansive world both epically vast and profoundly human, whose narratives depict crowds, landscapes, swimmers, emerging heads, flowers, skies and floating children.
Repetition is a dominant motif, but heresuch repetition derives from practices common to Eastern philosophy andmeditation techniques, which disrupt the chronological sensibility that is so fundamental to Western thought.
Fang's painting is rigorous, distinctive and balanced, suggesting within it the secrets of the East and the contemporary anguish of identity loss. It is an art of cynical fantasies: what appears to be radiant and smiling may reveal a painful reality. Fang's world of everyday fears is much nearer to us than we suspect.