This work shows a bald figure swimming in a vast expanse of water. The figure is closely connected to Fang Lijun himself with the artist’s signature bald head and his experience of learning to swim. Reality is ambivalent and changeable like water, and a swimmer has no choice but to go with the flow—like the figure in the painting, who is always between floating and sinking.
Fang Lijun (born 1963, Handan) graduated from the Print Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, in 1989. He is a representative artist of Cynical Realism, a major art movement in China post-1989. His works capture the disillusionment of a generation after the Tiananmen Square incident and reflect the helpless mentality of Chinese society in the early 1990s. Fang lives and works in Beijing.