From living, I feel that there are very many particularly nasty things that we all have ourselves, and that we cannot shake off, try as we may.

At this time, I discovered that there was a possibility in painting, and that this possibility was more direct than any writing, and that it was possible to compress life into the smallest surface, and to feel it in there, and to experience it slowly.

（Statements by the Artist, 1998)

The images in Fang Lijun’s Bald Louts series of works created from 1989 on, became a symbol of boredom and loutism. First, their expression is giggling or dazed, the back of the head perhaps backing onto an expressionless background, or looking bored as if yawning, rendering expression completely meaningless. When one adds the feeling of loutism in the bald heads to the meaningless expressions, they become images that signify rebellion and ridicule by dissolving any pre-existing system through meaninglessness, and that also cause this rebellion and ridicule to become a self-ridicule, an image of the self escaping the systems of meaning. Second, the wide open scenery of blue sky, white clouds and ocean have replaced the earliest treatment whereby the background was blocked with human figures. As a notion-image, the wide ocean and empty sky in fact express a feeling of personal liberation of the self from inner oppression. It neither submits to ideology, nor adopts the format of active resistance. These images of loutish comedy and boredom become a kind of role of ‘none-of-my-business’ and ‘non-presence’, allowing the self to achieve an inner feeling of ‘wide ocean and empty sky’. At the same time, as a contrasting poetic factor, it contrasts and strengthens the prominence of the lout in the meaningless image. Third, it emphasizes the lack of brushstrokes and coldness of the non-expression, highlighting the atmosphere of ‘non-presence’. Fourth, the colors are pure and bright throughout, maintaining the inner pleasure from the liberation and purification of the self.

(Li Xianting, Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art
[1990-2000], Edited by Wu Hung, Macao Press, 2002, P344[Extract])