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Ashmolean Exhibition: FANG LIJUN: PORTRAITS AND PORCELAIN

Ashmolean Museum
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford Beaumont Street Oxford Oxfordshire OX1 2PH

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This exhibition celebrates more than 100 artworks by the contemporary Chinese artist Fang Lijun, on loan from his studios in Beijing and Jingdezhen and from private collections. It showcases Fang’s paintings and drawings, and also ceramics produced in the last five years.

Fang Lijun was one of the leading protagonists of the early 1990s Cynical Realist movement, a major art movement in China post-1989. His works captured the disillusionment of his generation and reflected the feeling of helplessness in Chinese society in the early 1990s.

Some of these seminal paintings he became famous for – the large anonymous, shaven heads and blank faces – are in our exhibition, alongside early pencil drawings from his student days and newer ink paintings and a series of intriguing porcelain pieces.