EXHIBITION BACKGROUND

The sexual beauty always occupies the central visual point of every image of Ling Jian’s painting. The figures in his work are painted in highly realistic manner, but they appear as in a surreal world. They all seems wearing a mask, a mask that is forged out of contemporary cultural and social economical pattern. It expresses not only the artist’s sexual aesthetics that is based on a male consciousness, but also the artist’s reflections upon the society he lived. The models of his portraits are mostly from those pictures found in fashion magazines or commercial advertisements. He consciously selected certain types of people as his model, such as movie star or celebrities. The reason for selecting those people’s images as model is because they represent the specific aesthetic standards that this society has projected onto women. The interesting phenomenon in Ling Jian’s painting is that he sometimes consciously exaggerate the facial features of Chinese people, or to say that he purposely magnify the facial characteristics of eastern Asian people, which is according to the stereotypical western idea of what should be looked like a Chinese. He employs such strategy in his painting in order to question the idea of what is being regarded as Eastern Beauty? And upon which socio-cultural & historical background this kind of notion of Eastern Beauty is constructed? In a time that artificial beauty surgery and biotechnology could change a thing’s appearance as well as its genetic order, and western visual culture has dominated our medias and living environment, what is sexual beauty is not only a question of physiology, but actually a social question related closely with culture, economy and capitals and even ideology.

Ling Jian has been lived in Europe for long time, and three years ago he has returned to China and settled in Beijing. The radical transformation of modern Chinese society has had a deep impact upon the artist’s mind and forced him to view the society from a new perspective. The neo-rich class people and their new way of life therefore has become the dominant element in Ling Jian’s work in which they are represented in an eccentric surrealistic manner. His images of sexual body languages and absurd aesthetics mixed together to create a series of surreal female species. They tell us how the public sexual idols being produced. The figures in the portraits are represented in a classic manner, but their body languages and gestures suggest a contemporary atmosphere. The figures in the painting appeared in some banal and pretentious format, they come from the copy of gossip newspaper or fashion magazines. The super-slim female body have all implied the male aestheticism of female attractiveness in contemporary society. The strong criticize towards the banality of modern life appeared in his art with a kind of sense of humour and elegance. The exaggerated sexuality, which we could also find in Ling Jian’s painting, indicating one of the intrinsic marks of our time.

In his forthcoming solo show in Tang Hong Kong, Ling Jian will exhibit his recent series of work, juxtaposing with his new black-white photography works. These works together will transform the gallery space into a huge shrine of soul and lust that is constructed of the mixture of extreme beauty and fashion kitsch, in order to challenge our everyday visual experience.