- 1142
FANG LIJUN | 2002.1.1
Estimate
3,000,000 - 5,000,000 HKD
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Description
- 2002.1.1
- oil on canvas, in four parts
- each: 400 by 176.5 cm. 157½ by 69½ in.overall: 400 by 706 cm. 157½ by 278 in.Executed in 2002.
Provenance
Alexander Ochs Galleries, Berlin
Private Collection, Europe
Phillips, London, 14 October 2006, Lot 24
Acquired from the above sale by the present owner
Private Collection, Europe
Phillips, London, 14 October 2006, Lot 24
Acquired from the above sale by the present owner
Exhibited
Singapore, MOCA, Fang Lijun: Documenta, March - April 2012
Brussels, La Moutarderie Nationale, Collection Gillion Crowet, 2007 - 2019
Brussels, La Moutarderie Nationale, Collection Gillion Crowet, 2007 - 2019
Literature
Chinese Artists of Today: Fang Lijun, Shijiazhuang 2006, pp. 286-287, illustrated (detail)
Exh. Cat.,Beijing, The Danish Art Exchange, Fang Lijun - Grafik på rispapir, 2007, p. 17, illustrated (detail)
Lu Yinghua, Ed., Living Like A Wild Dog 1963-2008 Archive Exhibition of Fang Lijun, Taiwan 2009, p. 291, illustrated in colour (detail)
Lu Peng and Liu Chun, Eds., Fang Lijun, Beijing 2010, p. 348, illustrated in colour (detail)
Exh. Cat., Turin, GAM, Fang Lijun: The Precipice Over the Clouds, Turin 2012, pp. 114-115, illustrated in colour (detail)
Exh. Cat.,Beijing, The Danish Art Exchange, Fang Lijun - Grafik på rispapir, 2007, p. 17, illustrated (detail)
Lu Yinghua, Ed., Living Like A Wild Dog 1963-2008 Archive Exhibition of Fang Lijun, Taiwan 2009, p. 291, illustrated in colour (detail)
Lu Peng and Liu Chun, Eds., Fang Lijun, Beijing 2010, p. 348, illustrated in colour (detail)
Exh. Cat., Turin, GAM, Fang Lijun: The Precipice Over the Clouds, Turin 2012, pp. 114-115, illustrated in colour (detail)
Catalogue Note
The flowers that float within the pictorial space allude to the blooming of a hundred new thoughts and ideas – subconsciously scoffing at Mao’s own Let One Hundred Flowers Bloom campaign – as China embraced a market economy. Fang Lijun is clearly cynical about what such manna from Heaven implies.
Karen Smith
2002.1.1 is a monumental and archetypal Fang Lijun dystopian masterpiece – featuring a vast overwhelming sea of two of his most iconic motifs: flowers and bald heads. After graduating from the printmaking department of the Central Academy of Fine Art in 1988, Fang Lijun was amongst the first contemporary Chinese artists to receive academic recognition in the early 1990s. Two trademarks emerged – that of bald heads and flowers. When Fang began creating bald heads in around 1988, he said: “I noticed that although a shaved head on its own is very striking, its individuality disappears in a group of shaved heads. I found the idea very compelling that an individual person's feeling of being omitted and ignored in society is especially strong in our culture”. Elsewhere the artist has said: “For me, the importance of baldness lies in its cancellation of individual identity. It more strongly expresses a general concept of humanity.” In the early 1990s, Li Xianting coined the term “bald rascals”, referring to Fang Lijun’s trademark self-mocking bald figures, and shortly afterwards named Fang Lijun as the primary proponent of Cynical Realism.
In parallel to Fang Lijun’s iconic bald heads was the appearance of a gaudy aesthetic, which for Li Xianting “was perhaps stimulated by the colors of the Chinese environment. Early on he noticed the explosion of consumer culture, especially the increasing gaudiness of Chinese urban environments. He more than once lamented the profusion of vulgar colors in China. I remember clearly how he looked when he talked about the vulgarization of Suzhou's understated literati gardens. I think what I saw was a kind of anger, but the expression was a helplessness mixed with cynical humor. It was a feeling of 'If I can't change the situation, why bother?' The turn towards gaudiness in his colors came from his mischievous character. He used gaudiness to amplify the mockery and self-mockery." While Fang Lijun has refused to clarify on the symbolic meaning of his vibrant flowers that populate his works, he once wrote in 1995: “Human nature is likened to a piece of land where flowers and poisonous grass coexist and grow. Man, however, only wishes to see flowers and have therefore paid a high painful price for their negligence of the potential evil in human nature. We have to face the fact and weed out hatred like farmers weed out the grass” (the artist quoted in Hovdenakle, “Fang Lijun and His Art”, in Chinese Artists of Today: Fang Lijun, 2006, p.111).
Harnessing the artist’s most recognizable iconography, 2002.1.1 is an exceptional testament to Fang’s exploration of the survival of humanity under the grand flux of time. Fang’s bald figures posing in absurdist spaces were a profound expression of the collective mentality of the Chinese in the nineties. Disillusionment with the utopian idealism of the eighties led to a shift in mentality for a whole generation; in contrast to the confrontational stance of the ’85 New Wave, Fang prefers his self-satirical images as a means of self-redemption in the turbulent political climate. His compositions grew more complex towards the late 1980s, and the critic Karen Smith has written of these later works: "The multiple-figure compositions Fang Lijun began to produce in the late 1990’s comprise an inordinate and complex volume of people… Here Fang Lijun points to both the innocence of childhood that had been denied him, and the sense of loss this engendered as he matured, mingled with the mass blindness of society… Fang Lijun denies the figures any individual traits that would distinguish one from another: he simply repeats the same figure again and again… The flowers that float within the pictorial space allude to the blooming of a hundred new thoughts and ideas- subconsciously scoffing at Mao’s own Let One Hundred Flowers Bloom campaign – as China embraced a market economy… Fang Lijun is clearly cynical about what such manna from Heaven implies” (Karen Smith, Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant Garde Art in New China, Zurich, 2005, p. 165-167).
Karen Smith
2002.1.1 is a monumental and archetypal Fang Lijun dystopian masterpiece – featuring a vast overwhelming sea of two of his most iconic motifs: flowers and bald heads. After graduating from the printmaking department of the Central Academy of Fine Art in 1988, Fang Lijun was amongst the first contemporary Chinese artists to receive academic recognition in the early 1990s. Two trademarks emerged – that of bald heads and flowers. When Fang began creating bald heads in around 1988, he said: “I noticed that although a shaved head on its own is very striking, its individuality disappears in a group of shaved heads. I found the idea very compelling that an individual person's feeling of being omitted and ignored in society is especially strong in our culture”. Elsewhere the artist has said: “For me, the importance of baldness lies in its cancellation of individual identity. It more strongly expresses a general concept of humanity.” In the early 1990s, Li Xianting coined the term “bald rascals”, referring to Fang Lijun’s trademark self-mocking bald figures, and shortly afterwards named Fang Lijun as the primary proponent of Cynical Realism.
In parallel to Fang Lijun’s iconic bald heads was the appearance of a gaudy aesthetic, which for Li Xianting “was perhaps stimulated by the colors of the Chinese environment. Early on he noticed the explosion of consumer culture, especially the increasing gaudiness of Chinese urban environments. He more than once lamented the profusion of vulgar colors in China. I remember clearly how he looked when he talked about the vulgarization of Suzhou's understated literati gardens. I think what I saw was a kind of anger, but the expression was a helplessness mixed with cynical humor. It was a feeling of 'If I can't change the situation, why bother?' The turn towards gaudiness in his colors came from his mischievous character. He used gaudiness to amplify the mockery and self-mockery." While Fang Lijun has refused to clarify on the symbolic meaning of his vibrant flowers that populate his works, he once wrote in 1995: “Human nature is likened to a piece of land where flowers and poisonous grass coexist and grow. Man, however, only wishes to see flowers and have therefore paid a high painful price for their negligence of the potential evil in human nature. We have to face the fact and weed out hatred like farmers weed out the grass” (the artist quoted in Hovdenakle, “Fang Lijun and His Art”, in Chinese Artists of Today: Fang Lijun, 2006, p.111).
Harnessing the artist’s most recognizable iconography, 2002.1.1 is an exceptional testament to Fang’s exploration of the survival of humanity under the grand flux of time. Fang’s bald figures posing in absurdist spaces were a profound expression of the collective mentality of the Chinese in the nineties. Disillusionment with the utopian idealism of the eighties led to a shift in mentality for a whole generation; in contrast to the confrontational stance of the ’85 New Wave, Fang prefers his self-satirical images as a means of self-redemption in the turbulent political climate. His compositions grew more complex towards the late 1980s, and the critic Karen Smith has written of these later works: "The multiple-figure compositions Fang Lijun began to produce in the late 1990’s comprise an inordinate and complex volume of people… Here Fang Lijun points to both the innocence of childhood that had been denied him, and the sense of loss this engendered as he matured, mingled with the mass blindness of society… Fang Lijun denies the figures any individual traits that would distinguish one from another: he simply repeats the same figure again and again… The flowers that float within the pictorial space allude to the blooming of a hundred new thoughts and ideas- subconsciously scoffing at Mao’s own Let One Hundred Flowers Bloom campaign – as China embraced a market economy… Fang Lijun is clearly cynical about what such manna from Heaven implies” (Karen Smith, Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant Garde Art in New China, Zurich, 2005, p. 165-167).