Following the watershed Tiananmen Square Incident of 1989, a representative group of contemporary Chinese artists gradually began to receive recognition from the international art community in 1991, and it was around that time that cultural exchange programs among the Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao took off. Following Beijing Week of the Cross-Strait Cities Art Festival in 2006, the Museum held the first retrospective exhibition in Taiwan of the contemporary Chinese artist Fang Lijun, a key post-Tiananmen artist whose work had, by then, reached a definite standard of academic and popular value. Today, all features of contemporary Chinese art, including some well known figures on the international stage, Yue Minjun, Zhang Xiaogang and Zeng Fanzhi, developed their iconic images as inspired by Fang Lijun's style.

Starting in the 1990s, Fang Lijun was often seen in his rebellious, derisive iconic paintings with his head shaved, which situated his work in the Cynical Realism School. He substituted the individual qualities of being a person in an adapted collectivistic environment thus rendering the figures invisible, and in this way symbolizing the rebellion, banter, restlessness and confusion of the era. The Museum's large-scale retrospective exhibition of Fang Lijun's twenty-five year career comprises more than seventy important works from 1984 to the present, which includes drawings, oil paintings, prints, sculptures and installation pieces. Works for this exhibition have come together from museums and private collections in Europe, Japan, China and Taiwan. Through this retrospective of Fang Lijun’s works, the Museum hopes to initiate academic exchange and research within the greater Chinese art community.