Since author Milan Kundera quoted the ancient Jewish proverb “Man thinks, God laughs” in his acceptance speech for the 1985 Jerusalem Prize, the proverb has become well-known throughout the world. But why is God laughing? According to Kundera, the more a person thinks, the further he gets from the truth; the more we ponder, the more our minds diverge.

When Kundera made that acceptance speech in 1985, Ling Jian had yet to graduate from art school. The year before, in 1984, he had been busy taking part in a group show held at Peking University; based on the material at hand, this seems to be Ling Jian’s earliest exhibition in China. Two years later, Ling Jian would move to Vienna, Austria, and his artwork would eventually spread throughout Europe, exhibited in cities such as St. Petersburg, Dusseldorf, Cologne, Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris and London. Besides winning the top award at the 1993 Chinese Oil Painting Biennial at the National Gallery in Beijing, Ling Jian’s work was rarely seen or exhibited in mainland China. For this reason, understanding of his work in mainland Chinese art circles is heavily reliant on information found in the mass media. Naturally, there are numerous academic and critical treatments of Ling Jian’s work, but the vast and contradictory range of critical interpretations cannot but remind us of that wise Jewish proverb.

For Chinese artists born in the 1960s, it was no small feat to create or appreciate artwork that upended ideological conventions or ignored rote questions about the practical significance, progressive nature and real-life applicability of art. Perhaps it was Ling Jian’s many years of living abroad in different cultural environments that allowed him to transcend indoctrination and examine questions from a variety of viewpoints, thus abandoning the concept of a single “correct” answer or interpretation. Of course, in this day and age, trying to understand art in terms of outmoded ideology seems absurd; were we to try, we would surely, as the old proverb goes, give God good cause to chuckle.

This is the attitude we should keep in mind as we enter Ling Jian’s Moon in Glass, a new solo exhibition opening in UCCA’s Middle Room in January 2011. For Moon in Glass, the artist has created a series of female portraits painted on round canvases and printed on moon-shaped mirrors. As we pass these mirrors, the scenery changes: our own reflections begin to merge with the portraits, creating a shifting landscape that blends illusion and reality.

This ethereal atmosphere is amply expressed by the Chinese title of the exhibition: Shuidiao Getou, or “Prelude to Water Melody.” The title is taken from a cipai – a set pattern used in classical Chinese poetry – of the same name. The “Prelude to Water Melody” cipai was used by the classical poet Su Tung-P’o to compose philosophically contemplative verse (“Bright moon, when did you appear? / Lifting my wine I question the blue sky”) and by Mao Zedong to compose rousing revolutionary poems (“I have long aspired to reach for the clouds / And I again ascend Jinggang Mountain.”) As we can see, a single cipai can convey a wealth of content; when it is applied to an art exhibition or even a single work of art, it is robust enough to encompass the varied impressions of a multitude of observers. In this case, viewing Ling Jian’s female portraits on the basis of our initial impressions – that is, seeing them solely as explorations of femininity, female identity or changing male/female relationships in society – would be to reject the most basic evidence of our senses, to raise the banner of rationalism atop a shoddily-constructed intellectual scaffolding.

Ling Jian depicts his subjects in a way that is both richly expressive and transcendent. His androgynous characters may be beautiful, seductive, aloof or mournful, but the complex psyches hinted at or hidden behind their facial expressions clamor for our attention, offering us a jumble of conflicting testimony. Because we sense the limitless possibilities and myriad unknowns beneath the surface, different observers may come up with wildly varying interpretations of the same portrait. The inner emotions being communicated through facial expressions can be comprehended in various ways. If, when viewing Ling Jian’s work, we insist that perception take a backseat to reason, and try to use rationality as our guide, we are likely to indulge in too much baseless speculation and erroneous analysis.

This being the case, a dispassionate examination of some of Ling Jian’s previous series might be helpful. In the coldly seductive Don’t Cry For Me and the exquisitely sensitive Don’t Love Beauty – Love [the] Army’s Power, Ling Jian communicates his message in a more direct and immediate way. In his recent works, especially those since 2006, he has branched out from faces to the physical body, encompassing the whole universe of female physicality. Ling Jian paints young women with skinny bodies, cold pale skin, page-boy haircuts, gleaming jewelry, cherry red lips and provocative come-hither gazes, revealing a range of erotic visual cues that cannot be deciphered with simple reason or rationality.

Perhaps “kitsch” would be a better description of the state of the subjects in Ling Jian’s paintings. Kitsch is generally translated into Chinese as meisu (“appealing to mass taste/the tastes of others”) but in this case, zisu (“appealing to one’s own personal taste”) would serve just as well. In academia, the term kitsch is sometimes transliterated as keqi, approximating the sound of the word kitsch. All three words – keqi, meisu and zisu – can be used more or less interchangeably to express the concept of “kitsch.”

Modernism, in the current sense of the word, means defying convention, challenging accepted modes of thought and refusing to pander to popular taste. But because so-called “New Wave” art has always been heavily reliant on promotion in the mass media, it must continue to follow fashion and chase trends. Perhaps more so than other kinds of art, it must expend a great deal of effort catering to the masses. This expenditure of effort is most manifest in the artist’s thought process: the artist must be constantly thinking about how to cater to mass taste. This form of kitsch is, to a certain degree, a negative byproduct of human “abuse” or “manipulation” of the thought process.

Like a hunter in search of his prey, the artist leverages introspection, personal experience and understanding of the fine gradations of human emotions to capture external imagery and transform it into something symbolic of this age of fast-paced economic development. Ling Jian’s symbolism cannot be understood by mechanically applying pre-existing modes of thought, nor should it be viewed simply as kitsch. If we attempt to think our way to an understanding of his work, to ponder its meaning or ascertain its value, we will surely set God laughing again. Certain things are meant to be felt rather than understood, to be experienced viscerally rather than interpreted rationally.