Lot 72

The Artist
Private collection, New York
Christie's, Hong Kong, 23 November 2014, lot 767 (as a suite of four)
Private collection, Melbourne

Stone Face: China Art Now First Group Printing Exhibition, Beijing Art Now Gallery, Beijing, 3 November - 20 December 2004 (another impression)
Stone Face: China Art Now First Group Printing Exhibition, Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, China, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan, 22 November - 15 December 2004 (another impression)
Endlessness of Life: 25 Years Retrospect of Fang Lijun, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan, 18 April - 5 July 2009 (another impression)

Fang Lijun is an artist whose emergence and growth accompanied the opening of Chinese society in the 1990s. His works emphasise the pursuit of spiritual freedom and reflect upon the meaning of life in contemporary society. He has become worldly known for his paintings and woodcut prints with the subject of men with bald heads, often with distorted facial expressions, overcompensating smiles or yawning with dissatisfaction. Traditional in China, bald-headed men may be seen as dumb or stupid, and so through these figures Fang is sending a message about morality and how people define what is normal based on physical appearance, rather than internal moral character.

Fang's monumental sized prints revive the ancient Asian practice of woodblock printing, a complicated and exacting process of carving a 'negative' image into a panel, coating the surface in ink, and impressing the image onto paper; each colour and tone requires a separate plate and order of printing.

Fang has held almost 40 solo exhibitions in major art museums worldwide, including the Venice Biennale and Sao Paulo Biennial. His works are collected by the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Arts, San Francisco, among others.

Hannah Ryan
Prints and Multiples Specialist