Thus begins Anne Brontë’s poem first published in 1846 “Vanitas Vanitatis, et Omnia Vanitas”. In it, the author pays homage to the biblical Ecclesiastes aphorism that speaks of the futility of material goods and the frivolities of human life. In the early Seicento, Northern European painters adopted the term Vanitas as a popular genre responding to existentialist concerns, mostly influenced by Calvinist ideas of the times. Vanitas were still lives composed generally of skulls, decaying flowers or fruits, mirrors, burning candles, timepieces, and charming objects. These depictions worked as metaphors for the ephemeral nature of human existence: a material being with a physical end; and comprised all those trivial (because of finite) pleasures, which found their end in inevitable death.

Ling Jian’s RED VANITY, however, is not one of pure existentialist nature; rather, he explores contemporary vanities, his models embody present-day decadence: a modern conceptual revisiting of 17th Century Vanitas.

One evening I sat Beauty on my knee and I found her bitter, and I injured her.

-Arthur Rimbaud, 1871

The Beijing-based artist who spent over fifteen years in Germany bridges ideological gaps as he incarnates a contemporary Euro-Asian flâneur. A hybrid figure oscillating between the East and the West, Ling Jian the artist fits the profile of a chronicler of current visual cultural aesthetics: likewise admirer and sharp critic of beauty, enthusiast of shiny fashion magazines, trends, haute couture and style, yet a convinced Buddhist at core. While not placing (nor finding) himself quite on one side or the other, Ling Jian has known to pick and choose his role borrowing from two continents. His meticulous brush might have more in common with his Renaissance counterparts than what we might at first discern.

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Ling Jian places a magnifying glass over contemporary (global) culture, stressing the faults of an overly materialistic world entirely dependant upon the sensational, a social order that gives more value to the material immediate, than to the ungraspable everlasting. But his Vanitas also seems to veil behind the metaphor of color (Red), concerning itself with what seems a non-spoken trend in the new socio-political state of rapidly developing China –“Communist Sister” or Communism’s Sister? Ling’s photo-realistic renderings of models are at times android-like: inhuman and impossibly beautiful is our Communist Sister. A Fata Morgana, the illusion of an ideal. The series of paintings titled (Communist Sister) suggests not the earlier communism of the Cultural Revolution, but its modern sister -an improved clone? A parallel possibility of an obsolete system and (perhaps) its superior version.

Although there are obvious references to politics in Ling’s works, his work stands apart from the Political Pop genre that flourished in Chinese avant-garde art since the mid 1990s. Ling’s work is more about the phenomenon of economical development, mass consumption, the social impact of global change and today’s concept of beauty than it is about local politics.

Ling Jian’s oeuvre derives mainly from traditional and modern Chinese vernacular culture —popular Peking operas like Bai Mao Nu (“New noble/White Hair Woman,” 2006), idiosyncratic symbols (Chinese Dragon, cherry blossom fruits, Buddha derivations in earlier works from 2000-2005), the recurring Mao little red book or militant communist uniform, and even Western clichés of Asia (“Mme. Butterfly,” 2006)— while at the same time, he seasons and entwines it with a tint of Westernization.

Sight cannot fill the craving eye

Nor riches happiness supply*

With the glamorous shimmer of a shiny fashion magazine, the beauties of Ling Jian inundate every canvas since the early 2000s. The artist treats his subjects like a Mannerist would, with precise photo-realistic brushstrokes he tends to exaggerate features: slightly disproportioned, the models display elongated necks, gazes with extremely lengthened almond eyes, supple moist lips appear hyper-real and almost touchable, as the artist flaunts his craftsmanship and technical skill.

Ling also resorts to unsettling details, in his thought through compositions, repeatedly including apparently absurd or disconcerting details -a red thread hanging from a mouth or tied up around a face, a flag buried in a shoulder, a pony tail becoming a dragon head, a hand sunken into a giant Buddha head, painterly abstract dripping brushstrokes juxtaposed to his primary realistic figurative contained style…- all of which in fact have very specific purposes and meanings.

“The assault on beauty by the contemporary art world has left a confused and baffled art-viewing public uncertain about one of the very cornerstones of Western art and culture, namely, the pursuit of beauty.” And this also applies to Eastern-produced art. Upon first gazing at Ling Jian’s oversized headshots of fashion models, derived from torn out pages from ELLEs, VOGUEs, VANITY FAIRs and VISIONs covering the artists’ atelier, one of the first reactions is to want to categorize his approach within the “objectified female” perspective. But it is not female as prey, nor the merging of art and fashion discourses that interests him. It is neither an “attack” on beauty, but a meditation on its fragility.

Ling Jian patiently brushes lash-by-lash, pore-by-pore of his subjects with detailed attention and obsessive accuracy. Yet something has gone awfully wrong under the thin matte layers of the canvas: a mask of beauty conceals a void within. In their fleeting, almost painful good looks, these girls seem to be suffering, blood stained tears run through the sleek canvas surface -though not through the subjects’ porcelain skins (“I love you I kill you”, 2006). Anorexic, like in the work “1960s fashion 1” from 2006 (actually a subtle reference to the 1960s famine that swiped out a great percentage of Chinese countryside population) or disturbingly young, their blank expressions, glass-eyed gazes freeze the viewers while their alluring poses invite them to bask in at their beauty. These young women found in advertising shots of fashion magazines embody an ideal of youth, a society’s fear and vanity of body and mind; the futility of life, futility of beauty, and (going back to the Ecclesiastes): the inevitable end and fleeting nature of it all.

Knowing that earthly joys decay*

The female ageless face is representative of the cravings and blind yearnings of our society, the eternal Dorian Gray syndrome of modern life. Indeed, a society’s beauty ideal does not merely signify physical beauty, but a lifestyle ideal, and this entitles a certain kind of slavery, a confined existence reliant upon outside appearances and double morals. Ultimately, Ling Jian’s beauties and vanities are without doubt metaphorical incarnations of a society’s nihilist obsessions, whether purely aesthetic or political.

With RED VANITIES, Ling Jian goes a step further, displaying untamed visions of decadence and glamour, sublimely daring, bolder, and violently sensual. The spectator will become trapped by the allure of beauty, gazes as epitomes of innocence: pure, uncorrupted, suffering, paradoxical beauty. If we are able to see beneath the charms of Vanity, we might be able to grasp the artist’s message.

Hamburg, March 2007

-Jocelyn Adele González Junco is a Cuban-American art critic and curator based in Hamburg, Germany.

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* Anne Brontë, “Vanitas Vanitatis, et Omnia Vanitas” 1846