A Social Construction of Gender & Aesthetics
2007-03-06
- About Ling Jian’s Painting
By Wei Xing
Decadence is the Mannerist late phase of Romantic style. Romantic imagination broke through all limits. Decadence, burdened by freedom, invents harsh new limits, psychosexual and artistic. It is a process of objectification and fixation, disciplining and intensifying the rogue western eye.— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae
In Camille Paglia’s highly controversial dissertation Sexual Personae, this female scholar who comes from Yale made a thorough survey on the history of western art & literature within a period from ancient Greek to Oscar Wilde’s England. In the writing she pointed out that the driving forces of many great western artworks, from classic to modern, are come from the passion of sex and decadence, from the constant fighting between the spirit of Dionysus and social and religious conventions. The history could also be regarded as a kind of art history of the process of taboo breaking. It could be put this way that if without the passion of sex & eroticism, then there won’t be so many great artworks created, and probably we would not know who Michelangelo is and who is Botticelli.
Sex is always a natural impetus of human creativities. In Hindu religion sex is regarded as the media to carry the primary power of universe, and images and sculptures contain sexual activities are popular in decorating Hindu temples. In the secular level, many great literature or visual art works have embodied sexual and eroticism. Although some works may express these elements in a more deliberate way, and some do it implicitly. Andy Warhol’s screen print Marylin Monroe and German artist Thomas Ruff’s series photography work Nudes have all contained eroticism in different levels.
Lin Jian’s painting also contains this element; the sexual beauty occupies the central visual point of every image, no matter that’s of Buddha or of young girl, or transsexual man. The figures in his paintings all have tender skin and glistening lips. These figures 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 the cutted pictures from fashion magazines or advertisement. 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 once mentioned, what’s the Eastern Beauty? This question reflects the artist’s unique life course. He has been living in Europe for nearly 20 years, so for once a time in his life he has been surrounded by European faces. As both a foreigner and an artist, Ling Jian had to fight with cultural confrontation when he was in Germany and this led to the thinking on the issue of cultural as well as racial identity. So artist started to paint portraits of people with East Asian faces. In his mind, the beauty of Eastern people appeal to him with an unique charm, especially Chinese woman. Taking jewelry as a parable, for him, western people is like diamond, which has shining flash and sparkling light; nevertheless, Chinese people has been fond of jade and nephrite for thousand years. The ancient Chinese people praises someone who are morally respectable by using the phrase “A noble man with a humble spirit is like a jade with gentle elegance; when it comes to a woman people using the words like “as flower and jade” to describe the beauty of the lady. Jade in ancient China has been regarded as a kind of precious stone in which mystical power and energy is embedded. The beauty of jade is not outward but rather inward and self-contained. So Chinese people praises restrained and implicit beauty. In Ling jian’s work New Nobles No 1 a beautiful girl with an exaggerate oval shape face, almond shape eyes and sexy lips holding a hair pin set with colourful gemstones in her mouth. Her facial expression looks a bit naïve with a feeling of indifference, and her big black eyes staring at audience with an irony and taunt. Her delicate face resembles the heroine of Hollywood cartoon film Mulan, in which the figure of heroine was created according to the western cliché of the imagination of eastern culture. Ling Jian adopted this mode to create a picture that could fit into the critical theory of Orientalism to satirize the poor and stereotypical imagination of the east by western culture.
Ling Jian’s painting may arouse feminism critics due to the male cultural consciousness towards female imagery, but the deep meaning buried underneath the surface of the painting is artist’s ironical depiction of a kind of commercial culture in which male consciousness occupied a dominant position. His art is about artist’s personal and empirical reactions with daily lives around him. Those beautiful but twisted girls have huge head and tiny and fragile body, which gives them a weird look. The elements of extreme beauty and abnormality have perfectly combined together to create a contemporary canon of female beauty that is established by the complice of mass culture and market capitals. Thus the image of female is objectified; their gender role is pre-fixed in a patriarchal society.
Gender is a social construction, French social theorist Monique Wittig has discussed this issue in her text Woman is not born female she questioned the existing gender social structure, and pointed out that the possible way is to deconstruct the very notion of social gender, to liberate woman from the pre-fixed gender role that was designated by patriarchal social culture; indicating the intrinsic difference between physical sex and social gender. In this respect, Ling Jian’s art has also touched the sensitive issue from his unique artistic approach. Through exaggerating the female body characteristics and body proportion in his paintings, he exposes the twisted notion of contemporary female beauty, their un-proportional body just make them more sexy in the eyes of a male gazer.
In traditional Chinese cultural, sex is a social taboo, direct description of sexual activity is forbidden in mainstream culture. But it does not mean that erotic art is not existed in ancient China. In Ming dynasty, the booming print industry and prosperous commercial economy has led to the popularity of wooden print, among which erotic print had taken a large part, and had a great influence on Japanese art genre Yamato-e. But overall, in Chinese art figurative painting has long being ignored and was of trivial significance. In contemporary China, sex is not any more a social taboo, although pornography is still prohibited, people now intend to not hiding their appreciation and passion on any issues relate to sex and eroticism. Ling Jian’s painting may be regarded as containing eroticism, his style is between realistic and surrealism. 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, they are the hybrid of pop singers, internet celebrities, movie stars and urban white collar workers.
Ling Jian’s painting make me recall the image produced by American artist John Currin. When audience look at his paintings in the first time, they appear as from early renaissance and mannerist work. But after close reading the unique characters of Currin’s painting has come out. The figures (normally female) in the portraits are represented in a classic manner, but their body languages and gestures suggest a modern 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 and outsized breasts have all implied the male aestheticism of female attractiveness in contemporary American society. The strong criticize towards the banality of modern life appeared in his art with a kind of sense of humour and elegance.
Another American artist Richard Phillips has also followed a similar course and concept. His inspirations normally come from fashion or shopping magazines of 1970’s and 80’s. The image he painted in 1997 Tongue is a typical soft-porn style, the low viewpoint zoom in the model’s think lips and shining tongue and places them in the center of the painting. The larger-than-life size of the image imposes an intimidating seduction to the audience. The exaggerated sexuality, which we could also find in Ling Jian’s painting, indicating one of the intrinsic marks of our time.
For every nation, the reconstruction of its history of image and memory is an important issue. The heroic-romantic representation of PLA soldier in movie Yun Shui Yao and another Chinese artist Qi Zhilong’s oil painting are all the cultural products of the attempt to reconstruct the memory of history that is based on the contemporary aesthetic criteria. But Ling Jian’s big oil painting portraits the vulgar gender scene in contemporary Chinese society through a hyper-realistic approach. Thus his work has also taken part in the process of reconstruction of social image of memory, they together will constitute the archive of the history of image in 21th century.
Belle and hero are always the protagonists in a nation’s construction of cultural history. From Tate gallery in London to Louvre in Paris, the big part of those museum’s collections are of the portraits of various belles and heroes in the nation’s secular or religious history. They all posed their sexy bodies elegantly in the painting according to the aesthetic standard in their times, and their glories passed through the looking up of later generations. There is a news that Le Louvre, after Guggenheim, will build a branch in Abu Dhabi, the capital of United Arab Emirates. The French government says that the purpose is to share the nation’s rich art heritage and radiate its culture to parts of the world. People are suspicious about the project and link the plan with the geo-political and economical interests. Well, it’s certain that the power of image is omnipresent, and the tricky thing is that how the French people will show those naked sexy Venuses and Apollos to the local people?