Fang Lijun - Portraits and Porcelain

Fang Lijun - Portraits and Porcelain at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

This exhibition highlights works by Fang Lijun created over the last five years. Most are ink portrait drawings and porcelain pieces, the media of Lijun's early artistic training. Yet for some thirty years he enjoyed international fame for his bold colourful oil paintings and woodblock prints in a movement that art critics termed 'Cynical Realism' and he was the leading artist of 1990s China.

The motif that runs through all his work, from student sketches to complex, delicate porcelains, is that of the human head. While Fang's bald, expressionless faces in the 1990s symbolised the universal ennui of a politically controlled society, his recent works are personal portraits of friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances from throughout his life. In porcelain he challenges not the society around him but rather the precariousness of the material itself.

Paintings and woodcut:

Two Figures, (series 1, no. 5), 1991, (oil on canvas)

These figures are uncharacteristically expressive among Fang Lijun's paintings of this period, when most of his works depicted faces with exaggerated smiles or deadpan looks that emphasised disengagement rather than communication. Nonetheless, both figures here have questioning expressions. Lijun has painted this in oils, though the colours and tonal range rige it an appearance similar to ink and wash, or pencil.

Swimmer, 1998, (woodcut print on paper)    (apologies for the reflections on the head)

A lone swimmer is a subject Lijun chose frequently throughout the 1990s, and one of his best-known works of the period shows a single figure standing in an intensely blue pool. Many of his swimmers, inclucing the work shown here, appear to be self-portraits. Lijun suffered a fear of water as a child, only learning to swim after he had moved to Beijing as a student. 

Untitled, 1998, (oil on canvas)

From the mid-1990s for around a decade, Lijun's depictions of people became more colourful, with subjects that often turned towards nature rather than away from society. The combination here of a head, baby-like figures and small flowers, all in strong colours, is typical of this period.

Mr Li, 1998, (oil on canvas)

This painting is after an image or occasion from some years prior to its production. It depicts the art critic Li Xianting, a longtime friend of Fang Lijun who gave the name 'Cynical Realism' to the rebellious art movement of the 1990s in which Lijun became the leading figure. The painting stands apart from many of his depictions of swimmers in its use of monochrome oils, and the vivid actions of both the swimmer and the water.

Heads, 2016, (oil on canvas)

This image of multiple heads, shaven and viewed from the back, brings together elements common to much of Lihum's work from the 1990s onwards. The strong colours and golden look suggest some of the optimism of other works he produced during the late 1990s that included figures and flowers against strongly coloured skies, or the gold and orange swimmer paintings of the same period.

Porcelain:

Lijum's first artistic training was in ceramics. He went on to specialise in printmaking alongside painting and drawing, and has recently returned to making ceramics.

Porcelain, 2023

Lijun is interested in exploring the limits of the porcelain, and in this work he has created an exceptionally thin, delicate piece constructed around a matrix that burnt away in the kiln. 

In the centre is embedded a modelled head, the subject that has featured in his works on paper throughout his life.

Porcelain, 2023

This structure is the result of several thousand experiments in small pieces, shown below.  Part of its stability relative to other works comes from the use of a slightly thicker porcelain layer. The head embedded in the centre continues the use of the image that runs through his work from the 1980s onwards.

Porcelain is fragile, and Lijun is interested in discovering how thinly it can be made. He is interested in the fact that although succerssful production depends on the preparation of materials and control of the kiln, it is also the case that, in his own words, 'the final outcome depends on the interactive relationship between clay, glaze, water, temperature, weight and air'. It is this unpredictability that he uses as a creative starting point, testing the properties of the material in different constructions and various conditions.

The objects displayed here were all produced to test materials and techniques for making viable sculptural pieces. The materials include wire and paper, both of which were used for constructing an internal matrix to support the porcelain.

This piece shows the risks of pieces slumping in the kiln that frequently affects even much sturdier, commercial porcelains.

Portrait Drawings, 2018-2023, (ink and colour on paper):

The subjects of these drawings are all people the artist knows.