Compared to Gao's other students, Fang has received little scholarly attention, and auction prices for his works have generally been low.

[8] There, he studied new techniques for depicting figures, eschewing the strong defining outlines of traditional Chinese painting in favour of a more restrained approach.

[6] After his return to China in 1935, Fang – together with three other painters, including his wife Yang Yinfang and two of Gao Jianfu's students,[10] – organized a joint exhibition.

Through the end of the decade, Fang participated in the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939 in San Francisco and held shows in California and New York.

The organization was intended to reject what the artists perceived as the patriarchal approach employed by Gao, who was accused of putting his own interests ahead of his students.

A special publication issued by the organization for its inaugural exhibition in Hong Kong included an autobiography of Fang that claimed he had had no master.

[18] Fang spent the last years of the war in Zhongshan,[19] with several of his works included by the Republic of China government in a 1947 overview of the art world.

[23] While continuing to produce works that depicted the human form, with exhibitions in Guangzhou, Beijing, and Shenyang in 1956,[6] Fang also taught the arts.

[24] The contemporary art critic Wu Zhao lauded Fang's painting as distinctive and "fully expressive of the present time", blending elegant lines and compositions with innovative colours and harmonies.

[28] Such subjects were generally presented with what the art scholar Ka Ming Kevin Lam describes as "a peculiar air of calmness and detachment", without any indication of hardship or emotion.

Although painters have succeeded in creating a pure painting in landscape and flower-and-bird, that made art further removed from life and its content even more hollow.

[32] The art historian Ralph Croizier writes that, of Gao Jianfu's disciples who studied in Japan, Fang was the most noteworthy due to his productivity and his "boldness of experimentation", though he was ultimately "more innovative than influential";[33] generally, Guan Shanyue, Li Xiongcai, and Yang Shanshen are given more prominence in scholarship.