The geographic centrepoint of contemporary art and culture – where it’s at – is constantly changing. In the 1950s, the inspiration radiated from Paris to New York, enlivened by the cultural innovations in music, visual art and live performances. This influence continued to reverberate throughout the Western world well into the 1980s where Japan started to play a part in the direction of contemporary culture. At present, the West’s monopoly on our cultural geography is even more being challenged by a new and roaring future – the whole of Asia itself.

Since the age of globalisation first hit China, the pursuits of individualism have multiplied at a rapid rate, becoming the symbol of a highly consumer-oriented and information-based society. Especially in major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu etc, due to economic progress, the hybridization of socio-cultural mores is becoming a norm– urbanites are turning towards popular culture; rural women are taking to nylon and lipstick and men to personal grooming. Against the juxtaposition of haute couture and socialist realism, it is a complete exploration of the material takeover.

The grooming of self has seen far more media devoting their lifestyle-oriented crusade on what it takes to be accountable for one’s image, mannerism and style. To put it simply, if looks could kill, we will have more reds on the streets of China now than what the nation symbolically originate for the colour. Red, after all, is still and remains the symbolic colour of the communist revolution - the ideological blood that has stained and united the country more than 50 years ago.

Nevertheless, what probably unite the country right now (or should I say more of the citizens) are the ideological shifts in Chinese society as it flirts with a capitalist-style economy. An uneasy balance between the vast bedrock of tradition and every glancing wind of modernity and change. Like the rest of China’s booming Industries, the country’s visual art went from a stiff social realistic tradition to unbridled pluralistic explorations. Echoing the conflict between traditional identities and cross-cultural transformations, most Chinese contemporary art pay homage to the increasing realities of Chinese society today.

Ling Jian is an artist whose career has coincided with this fiery cultural romance of the in-between, all-shook-up, split-and-subdivided creative being. Educated in Beijing, Ling has moved and lived in Hamburg, Germany for more than 20 years until his return to the Chinese capital only 2 years ago to reconnect with his society.

Born in 1963, Ling has employed the aesthetic of portraitures in his oeuvre, generating a transfixing body of artworks. According to the artist, most of his painted characters come from everyday life – from what he sees and what he feels. Perhaps more importantly, being someone who has lived away for a long time, Ling is also reacting to the amazing turnaround in tastes and values that are taking place around him. Ling’s paintings focus merely on the expansive allurement of faces. By providing up-front confrontation with the portraitures on round panels, we are drawn compulsively at the larger-than-life images that seem to exist between the real and the imaginary, between the different and the aberrant. Western features are appropriated with slanted eyes, bone structures that are more fittingly with the Asian look; even the portrayals of “Buddha” are lusciously refined with variations of feminine presence – eyelashes, red lipsticks and etc.

In an early series featuring paintings of Buddha, as a devoted Buddhist, Ling conjures a volatile situation whereby spiritual drive has taken a step back from physical desire and perfection. It is a sensitive allegory of the fragility of our position in society depending more and more on appearances or rather, to fantasize with how beauty is shaped to becoming an international synonym of being desirable. In other words, “an obsession with beauty and physical perfection has arguably taken the place of striving for spiritual perfection.”1 Looking at this series of paintings, we find ourselves in the in-between space where reality and fantasy meet, where reality becomes fantasy and fantasy reality.

Not only are his techniques of neo-realism make the paintings something to behold when viewed, Ling gives form to his preoccupation with the norms and banalities of social and interpersonal elements. His commitment is to rendering his vision in terms of the wit and humour, the dream and irony, which live within the compilations of his paintings. Exemplified clearly in his early two paintings, titled “Asian Fashion Sabina I and II”, we see a Caucasian lady resting her fingers on both sides of her upper face in one painting. And in the other panel, her fingers are seemingly pulled back as if to create a pair of slanted eye – a facial feature commonly associated with Chinese. At the same time, nothing in his art remains at just one level of experience. Mediations such as those of colour, context and representation, as well as the more subtle ones of poetic and metaphor, entrust the viewer with imaginative assessment. Building on the critical success of his early portraitures, Ling has, in recent years, gradually moving from portrayal of facials to full-bodied expressions.


By proposing a personal response to a reality saturated with social complexity, Ling continues to paint men and women, though much more of the latter, of refined appearances – liberating them to a physical world of countless possibilities. His inherent knowledge of the finer modes of dress, style, decorum and mannerism became the presumed bedrock of values on which he built his images. In his new series, which began in 2006, Ling invites the gaze while combining attitudes of irony and wit to seemingly set current standards of idealized (and idolized) existence which he observed in his lived environment today. Aptly, it is a landscape that is enthralled by an advent growth in media commercials and beauty and lifestyle magazines, all of which were introduced to China only slightly more than a decade ago.

Literally defining their physical space, the painted women bore all the emblems of refinement and class superiority. Their fair skins, bony frames and coiffures - from dolly bobs to silky tresses - served as a background for gleaming jewelries and elaborate dress styles. Moreover, there’s something of an erotic of representation in the spectacle that all his painted figures enact, whether it is a large gem ornament dangling between the lips, sucking a cherry halfway through the mouth or merely, the alluring stares. This further adds a responsive element reminiscent of advertisements, creating a sensual spontaneity composed through decisive moods and musings. These stilled enigmas, bathed so often in the natural light of ambiguity, are intrinsic to ling’s pictorial language.

As the artist expresses, “women are the manifestation of myriad personalities and lifestyles in a particular climate. This is why it can be said that women take the lead in changing the times.”2

It may also be noted that the male figure makes an infrequent appearance in Ling’s artworks, and when it does it is often as a complementary entity necessary only to the establishment of male/female equal attitudes towards beauty today. 

These paintings also demonstrate new individuality within a tradition and a level of decision-making that fulfills an articulation of a particular sense of life and living. That this includes attention to current trends in fashion and accessories turn these beautiful creatures into cultural slogans of extreme refinement and sensibility. But as compositional devices, not all images are rosy perfect. In the acknowledgement of actuality, identity and imperfection, Ling also allows fragilities and marginalia to manifest into the paintings. Despites their looming presence, the figures appear vulnerable, victimized. There are blood-like tears running through their cheeks, bleeding red armbands around their arms, also appear in some bodies as a fading mark, and tiny flags pricked into their delicate skins, leaving traces of blooded wounds. All these interpretive traces are exemplified in paintings such as “Don’t cry for me No. 2”, “Beijing Bar No. 3” and the circular “Don’t love beauty – love army’s power! No. 3” just to name a few.

Such imageries call to attention by the artist on his penetrative observation with the current socio-cultural shifts in his country. It’s a grand surface in transit with the society ricocheting wildly between the old, rigid China and today’s capitalistic cloud, accepted by either, scarred by both. In this context, and throughout his paintings, Ling places himself at the crossroads between worlds, allowing for the coming together of differing mentalities.

Painting has often taken the human body as a point of reference for the rest of the universe – making it the measure of all things. Assembled together, do these faces and poses define “the beauty” in new China? As far as the artist is concerned, it is certainly one of the idealized pursuits in our material-hungry society. Under such consequence, straightjacketing the individual with a rigid notion of beauty. As the artist once said, “These ‘beautiful men and 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 perspective.”3

Ling’s artistic impulses are very theatrical in nature: a drive toward glamour melodrama at one extreme, and towards erotic-political at the other. Stretching from the minutiae of socio-cultural contexts to symbolic references, the paintings model themselves as an exploration of the continually nature of cultural phenomenon on both a local and global scale