Pencil drawing No. 3

Since the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) successive generations of young Chinese artists have experimented with different ideas and styles, while engaging in an exploratory dialogue with Western philosophy, literature and culture. Academic realism has been taught at Chinese art academies since the 1940s and continues to be a main technique influenced by Classical European art and individual artists such as American painter Andrew Wyeth. While some of the artists of the first two post-Revolution generations depicted the harsh realities of rural poverty and misery with a humane concern, there emerged a third, more despairing generation of artists. Fang Lijun epitomises the generation that adopted a kind of "rogue cynicism" which reflected their acute feeling of the meaninglessness and hopelessness of their own lives and society. Fang Lijun graduated from the printmaking department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. This drawing was one of several he prepared for his graduation assignment with the intention of converting them to etchings. The student demonstrations and Tiananmen Square massacre disrupted classes and the final prints were never made.

'Asian Art', AGNSW Collections, 1994, pg. 209., Since the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) successive generations of young Chinese artists have experimented with different ideas and styles, while engaging in an exploratory dialogue with Western philosophy, literature and culture. Academic realism has been taught at Chinese art academies since the 1940s and continues to be a main technique influenced by Classical European art and individual artists such as American painter Andrew Wyeth. While some of the artists of the first two post-Revolution generations depicted the harsh realities of rural poverty and misery with a humane concern, there emerged a third, more despairing generation of artists. Fang Lijun epitomises the generation that adopted a kind of "rogue cynicism" which reflected their acute feeling of the meaninglessness and hopelessness of their own lives and society. Fang Lijun graduated from the printmaking department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. This drawing was one of several he prepared for his graduation assignment with the intention of converting them to etchings. The student demonstrations and Tiananmen Square massacre disrupted classes and the final prints were never made. 'Asian Art', AGNSW Collections, 1994, pg. 209.