2008-10-18 LING JIAN: TWO WORLDS, ONE SYSTEM

By Peter Frank

The temptation is to extract from Ling Jian’s images the recent history of a people. Such temptation is understandable; as demonstrated repeatedly over the last two decades, the gradual and tumultuous emergence of the People’s Republic of China from its Maoist isolation has had clear and profound repercussions in its contemporary art. Now that the giant has shaken off its sleep, our need in the west to comprehend that giant – a need going back before Roman times – has taken on a renewed urgency. That need and urgency prompt us to frame all new Chinese art in oracular terms; and if the artists themselves are motivated to answer our questions – because our questions are also their questions – they have an eager, readymade audience at the wait. But, whatever the collective traditions of the Chinese, the artists among them are also responding to the newly, and increasingly, available cultural traditions of the West. Figuration and spectacle, two of the most salient characteristics of new Chinese art, may be integral parts of traditional Chinese culture, but they are also integral to modern Western art, and their Western manifestations provide today’s Chinese artists with potent, even if ironic, stylistic models.

Ling Jian’s art is, thus, not Westernized Chinese art (or, for that matter, Orientalized western art), but a carefully negotiated hybridization calibrated to the artist’s expressive concerns. That, on one level, could describe any credible art produced outside a vacuum. But Ling’s fusion of means is itself a “statement.” It is a display of multiple cultural sources – he has worked outside as well as inside China for over twenty years, one of the new Chinese artists directly exposed to Western sources the longest – and is, perhaps resultingly, a critique of social conditions across cultural divides. One of the points Ling makes, in fact, is that these divides are shrinking, that not only do universal themes pertain in art, but now universal styles and methods pertain as well. What speaks to Chinese circumstances not only speaks to Westerners about those circumstances, but speaks to Western conditions as well. Ling’s paintings, it turns out, are not windows onto a distant civilization, but mirrors of the global village into which the distance has been collapsing.

No question but that Ling Jian regards his art as a presentation of symptoms. His recent concentration on a single subjective range – young, attractive women of an Asian cast – may be pitched in order to exploit scopic interest, even desire (“I attempt to multiply the power of temptation by displaying it on my canvases,” he has written); but it has been chosen, and is varied, in order to reflect social circumstances, circumstances that pertain within China and without. “The cold skin of the lady [sic] in my painting symbolizes a high degree of spiritual indifference and melancholy that come about when ideals have vanished,” Ling observes. He continues:

By taking a closer look at the changes in women and how they are represented, various changes can be suggested about the human race. By the same token, women’s attire, decorum, and the manner that they are advertised in pictures aptly represents Shanghai in the 1920s, the Renaissance in Europe, and even present day global developments that we have come to understand in terms of politics, economics, and culture through these respective periods – women are the manifestations of myriad personalities and lifestyles in a particular climate…. These “beautiful women” in my paintings, are simply spiritual representations of the Chinese and their newfound complacency towards neo-nationalism, as well as towards their values and aesthetic perspectives.

Clearly, Ling’s self-appointed purview is not just of China, but of the world. Much has been made, quite rightly, of the commentary he makes through his art on the new conditions that pertain in his native country; having re-established himself there barely three years ago, after his long sojourn in the West, his art manifests the profound cultural displacement of a returning exile, a prodigal son who finds on his return to the family that they have become much like the rest of the world. But this revelation, the discovery that the inner world has become like the outer, thrusts Ling back into the international discourse. He has come home to China only to find himself that much more concerned with an international context. In an interview he stated, “I must review China with a realistic perspective. It may be the age in which I was born and grew up. Whether good or bad memories, or something personal that can be felt by me alone, I should express these things. There may be symbolic contents[sic] in it. But I don’t intend to overstress the symbols. They only represent my feelings.”

As observed, Chinese artists generally are grappling with their relatively rapid emergence onto the international stage. Having worked in Europe for as long as he did, Ling’s struggle is just the reverse – having already occupied that stage, Ling has to deal with the fact that “home” is no longer a refuge, but has become part of the stage. But this only serves to heighten the evident universality of Ling’s concerns, and to make apparent his relationship to new artistic tendencies that transcend the Chinese context. To be sure, his association with new Chinese art is strong and unmistakable; to the same extent as his peers, Ling derives from Pop art, old (Anglo-American) and new (Sino-Japanese), pop sources (magazines, advertising, cinema), and childhood memories of an anti-pop, propaganda-driven social environment. But Ling’s two-decade-long stay in the West has enriched his attitude even as it has widened his sources, and casts his work at least partly outside the framework of “new Chinese art.” That is to say, he – still – has one foot outside China even as he has the other foot in.

Ling’s painting, in fact, bears many of the earmarks, stylistic and expressive, we have come to associate with a relatively new but already prominent development in Western figurative art. Variously labeled “newbrow,” “lowbrow,” “neo-punk” and “pop surrealism,” this tendency cultivates contemporary anomie by conflating commercial-art techniques, macabre imagery, attenuated narrative, surrealism-derived distortion, and abundant popular culture references into an aesthetic that is at once highly (and deliberately) irritating and forcefully exhilarating. When handled deftly by an artist with a keen sense of visual surprise, and similarly keen sense of social dissonance, such “newbrow” art can engage, enchant, and excoriate like a fever-dream theater of the soul, addressing reality with fantasy and fantasies with realities. (One of its other monikers is “agit-pop.”) Given its pop-art antecedents and its sensitivity to current social conditions, newbrow art in the West mirrors many aspects of new Chinese art, from “cynical realism” on. (Much newbrow art might be described as “cynical surrealism.”) Ling Jian’s painting, however, seems not just parallel to newbrow art, but practically part of it – indeed, as much part of Western newbrow as it is of Chinese pop-criticality.

Might newbrow and that pop-criticality be, in the end, the same thing? No, as they spring from and speak to discrete, and in many ways diametrically opposed, sources. But, without glossing over that so-far-unresolved opposition, Ling’s art finds continuity between the two cultural poles and locates itself between, displaying a miscegenation of spirit as well as manner. The sharp and theatrical, yet casually presented, violence that pervades Ling’s paintings of women, for instance, is made possible by the acceptability, even ubiquity, of such presentation in current Western art; it is made necessary by the lingering Chinese resistance to such imagery, a resistance rendered almost hypocritical in a burgeoning Westernized social milieu. And in Lian’s knowing recontextualization, the violence is, of course, part of his immersive conjuration of sexuality and provocation (however oblique) of desire. One man’s lust is another man’s blood.

The slickness of Ling’s style and the exploitative prurience of his subject matter have occasioned no little criticism. But, like his newbrow counterparts (or, if you would, compeers), Ling produces such unseemly, coarsely pandering images not in order to sell or seduce, but to provoke disquietude, to deconstruct the modern process of seduction through imagery. Newbrow artists are preoccupied with the sinister blandishments of late capitalism, and it’s no surprise that Ling is even more so: by moving from China to Germany, he exchanged the visual aridity of one for the visual lushness of the other – replacing Mao with Marilyn, as it were – but addressed the latter from the same critical distance with which he’d regarded the former. Now, the China to which Ling has returned has been overcome by its own tsunami of consumerist visual persuasion, and the artist, a newbrow voice among (cynical) realists, (political) popsters, and (spectacle) performance artists, is uniquely prepared to examine that tsunami.

At least it seems that way from a Western point of observation. But from that point, for all his newbrow-adjacent characteristics, Ling still seems very much a Chinese artist, at least as close in manner and attitude to the work of his countrymen and –women as he is to Western newbrow’s own pop-surrealist strategies. He exploits rather than deflects the exoticization of his race and civilization, amping it in the Western context to the level of parody. He appropriates and exaggerates the tropes of popular visual entertainment as it manifests in the West, including (perhaps especially) Japan. And he generates coherent bodies of work in which variations on a theme work themselves out. The themes, or at least their variations, may offend some in their exaggeration of seemingly racist and sexist markers. (Ling manages to subject race to the same voyeurism that sex normally attracts, manipulating the features of his subjects to betray or mask their race just as he heightens certain sexual markers and minimizes others.) But that exaggeration becomes part of a more broadly distorting quality in Ling’s aesthetic. With their swollen heads, elongated necks and limbs, odd gestures, and tendency to weep bodily fluids other than tears – among other un-natural characteristics (which Ling, cannily, changes from picture to picture, resisting the imposition of formula) – his subjects are mannerist caricatures, surrealized parodies à la newbrow. In this way they amplify secondary sexual characteristics according to contemporary tastes; but as often as not they deliberately overshoot those tastes, resulting in frightening enactments of the appearance disorders (e.g. anorexia, self-mutilation) that plague young women today.

Ling’s trenchant commentaries are driven not by disgust with the social system, in China or the West, that holds women in such physical (not to mention economic) bondage, but by fascination with that system. For one thing, he clearly believes that men’s complicity in the system ultimately determines their behavior, too. For another, he sees that the system now operates with even more impunity in China than it does in the West; the “bling” adorning so many of his women represents the materialism now so rampant in his native country. And for yet another, he admits to being as much in the system’s thrall as anyone else. At the same time Ling can look at the West through Chinese eyes and at China through Westernized eyes, he can look at the new global visual culture with the eyes of a Maoist child and the eyes of a European adult; but he can look at that culture only from within it. He can no more transcend the global culture than he could the Cultural Revolution, and, he’s telling us, neither can we.

Ling Jian’s paintings are reports about the system from inside the system to others inside the system. The system does not suppress them, it co-opts them, casting them as just so much more New Chinese Art. But Ling’s bicontinental cultural experience broadens and complicates his message, as his newbrow-like visual strategies demonstrate. His reports come from multiple vantages. His dissonance has a difference.

Los Angeles October 2008

All quotes are from “Something transient – A choice of temptation,” Ling Jian’s statement in Ling Jian: Red.Vanitas (Schoeni Art Gallery, Hong Kong, 2007) and Zhang Yizhou’s “Interview with Ling Jian” in surFACE: in transit (Tang Contemporary Art, Bangkok and Beijing, 2008)