LING JIAN: TWO WORLDS, ONE SYSTEM
By Peter Frank
www.lingjian.org/en/news/40_news.html
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. [.........]
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