Date：2025.5.23 - 6.30

Venue: Hall 1/2/3/4, 1F, Guangdong Museum of Art (Er-sha Island)

（Address: 38 Yanyu Road, Ersha Island, Yuexiu District, Guangzhou, Guangdong）

Supervising organization: Research Institute of Culture and History, the People's Government of Guangdong Province

Organizers：Guangdong Museum of Art

 

Introduction

 

Fang Tang is a pioneer of news cartoons in the early period of reform and opening up, and his creations constitute a visual archive of a specific historical stage. In the 1980s, he used the current affairs cartoon column of Yangcheng Evening News as his position, outlining social conditions with sharp strokes, and pointing to real problems with exaggerated model and profound metaphors. Cartoons not only existed as an art form, but also became a container of public opinion and a carrier of concepts during the period of social transition. Through the syntax of exaggerated and deformed modelling, social issues were transformed into readable pictorial symbols, which intervened in the public sphere with their immediacy and popularity.

 

In 2021, under the facilitation of Guangdong Provincial Institute for Culture and History, Fang Tang, as a member of the institute, donated more than 700 paintings and calligraphy works and 50 volumes of manuscripts to the Guangdong Museum of Art, becoming an important resource for combing the development of Guangdong's art and constructing a regional art genealogy, reflecting the artist's self-consciousness in integrating his individual life into cultural inheritance. This exhibition is not only a review of the artist's individual creative process, but also an important theoretical slice of the modernity path of Chinese art. Through the juxtaposition and dialogue of the four thematic units, we are able to see how an artist responds to the propositions of the times with his individual experience and builds a cultural bridge between tradition and modernity. The Guangdong Museum of Art hopes that this exhibition will serve as an opportunity to promote the deep academic excavation of Lingnan art, and to renew the contemporary life of local traditions in the context of globalisation.