Fang Lijun

executed circa 1989

Private Collection, Sydney
Acquired directly from the artist after his graduation show in 1989 by the present owner's mother

an area of 0.8 by 0.5 cm upper layer paint loss at the lower left corner. minor abrasion at the bottom edge in the centre part. Otherwise, generally in satisfactory condition
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Submerge. Surface. Breathe. Repeat. Fang Lijun's massive output, recently the subject of a major touring retrospective in Taipei, Guangzhou, and Beijing, hinges on the central motif of the swimmer. Deep in azure waters, his bald head coming up now and again air, this aquatic figure, even more than the bored, yawning faces with which Fang first made his name, is at the heart of the artist's concerns.

Of course for many commentators on Fang Lijun's painting over the years, the first reference contained in his swimming figures is to the famous images of Chairman Mao swimming across the Yangtze at Wuhan in 1966, the year the Cultural Revolution began. But this sort of referentiality is too easy for the work of an artist who does not simply play on symbols. Rather, the swimmer is a metaphor for the human struggle in the most basic, visceral sense. These swimmers are not drowning in some untamed ocean, but rather looking for a way to exist in the isolated suspension of the water.

Fang Lijun's interest in water dates back to the mid-1980s, but only begins to appear as a background in 1989. When swimmers started to appear in the early 1990s, they were still depicted in perspectival relation to the sky. The swimmers completely floating alone in the sea came later. In conversation with the critic Li Xianting, Fang once noted that his original starting point for his swimming paintings was a series of aquatic works by the British painter David Hockney. "I saw these works and they delayed my decision to paint water for nearly two years," Fang recalled. "I was skeptical that I could not avoid the trap Hockney had set, unsure of how to do this differently from him. But then I had a breakthrough, and decided to paint water. Once I got going there were no problems at all, because I never painted the edges of the water, never gave the sense of it being a pool. If there were edges, or the reflections of trees, the feeling would be entirely off—it would seem like a scene. I never wanted to be so referential."

The water paintings fit into a larger tradition of portraiture, which for Fang Lijun begins with his student days at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Four years of studio exercises led to a final imperative to create a set of graduation works in 1988. With classmates, Fang made the customary trip to Yunnan province looking for inspiration and material, but came back to Beijing empty-handed. It was back at school that he stumbled upon an album of photos of peasants in Shexian, Hebei province, owned by his classmate Zhang Linhai who came from that rural region. Fang quickly created a set of drawings based on these photographs, with all the characters rendered as bald heads. This was the set of drawings that he would go on to exhibit in the China/Avant-Garde Exhibition the following year.

As this was Fang Lijun's graduation project, the main requirement he faced from his instructors was to demonstrate his technical proficiency. To that end, Fang proposed to make a series of works in different media based on the same images: "I told my teachers that I would make a set of drawings, paint a set of oil paintins, carve a set of woodblocks, and engrave a set of lithographs, all based on these same images. Part of the idea was to say, Look how good I am, I can do so many different things," Fang recalled in a 2009 interview with the critic Carol Yinghua Lu. The other Fang Lijun work in this sale, an oil painting, Untitled (Lot 766), based on his Drawing No. 3, is part of this project.

In a 2001 interview, critic Pi Li posed to Fang the basic question, "What about water most attracted you?" Fang's answer is instructive, revolving not around meaning conveyed by paint on canvas, but on the very position of the artist in relation to his audience. Fang said: "I think water is neutral. I have always liked neutral things, like bald heads. And water endows my paintings with a sense of the painter's absence. This allows the viewer to be absorbed into the painting."

The present work, 1998.8.30 (Lot 767) is a key example from the entire range of swimming and water paintings produced throughout Fang Lijun's career.  Over ten days in the summer of 1998, Fang produced what amounts to a trilogy of swimmer paintings distinguished from his other work of that immediate period by their elegance and simplicity. Each measuring 2.5 meters tall by 3.6 meters wide, these paintings also happen to be among the largest he had produced up to that point. 1998.8.20 depicts a swimmer facing the artist, his arms outstretched at the top of his stroke. 1998.8.25 seems to show the same swimmer a few moments later, or perhaps just from a different angle, his body arrayed near the surface, as his feet crescendo in the splash of a kick. It is in the present canvas, 1998.8.30, that the swimmer seems to realign himself, treading water and beginning his ascent to the surface for a much-needed breath. In this work, the figure skews slightly to the right and looks back to the left of the frame, in subtle disregard of an unseen object lying just beyond our view.

In these large canvases, Fang Lijun reins in the exaggerated orange and pink colorations of his early 1990s water works, preferring instead a more natural flesh tone. Interestingly, the swimmer paintings largely date to summertime, and these represent a change from his previous summer's output, the green-and-orange works later shown at Galerie Serieuse Zaken, Amsterdam in his first major European outing. Here Fang seems to be most concerned with the technical center of his chosen motif, paying explicit attention to the way the water is displaced and ripples around the figure, the way the water refracts those of his subject's facial features which happen to lie below the surface. The studies in water current are achieved with an exceedingly naturalistic white finish, sharply differentiated from works in which water is painted in a more impressionistic and arbitrary manner. Here we feel the artist at a time of extreme contemplation, looking to discern the full range of possibilities his subject will allow. The deepness of the canvas's blue, then, emerges as a cipher for the artist's entire project of meaning-making.

For Fang, we get the sense that painting water is very much about painting in the most basic, vital sense. When Pi Li asked him what difficulties emerge in the process, Fang gave an instructive answer: "For a painter, painting emptiness is the greatest challenge of all. New painters like to show off their grasp of detail, but for me, getting beyond this reliance on details is the most difficult test of all."