Fang Lijun once said: “I’ve always liked quite neutral things, like bald heads. In fact, water is quite neutral as well, and when used in paintings can make it feel like the artist is absent. The artist should retreat from the painting and not rely on passion or communication to draw the viewer into the painting. Only by relying on natural means can the artist allow the viewer to enter into the painting unobstructed. On this basis, the “props” that appear in a painting are very important. I often choose water because it is neither good nor bad, humans cannot be without it, and it somehow feels familiar and close, yet at the same time alien and distant. I think that water has a fantastic connotative range and that our relationship with it has always occupied a space of moderate ambiguity.”

“Water and sunlight are for the most part handled in such a way that lays emphasis on the implicit. An artist has the same responsibility as an architect, in that both are obliged to grant people space. However, the role of an artist is not to teach, in the same way that one might teach a child to read, rather an artist should merely prompt. An artist should provide people with a certain personal understanding in their work, and as I see it, the fulfilment of this responsibility should be the fundamental goal of any good artist. In this expression there should be a clarity of focus. Take for example if I were to draw a piece of straw floating in the painting, I have thus changed the very nature of the painting as it may give people the wrong message. I must have nothing. I must give the audience nothing. Then, and only then will the audience be able to enter into the painting.”

(Beijing Current Affairs News, 25th of September 2000, page 11, Written by A Li, Modern Art, 2002, Volume 1, Issue 3)