Ling Jian, Grew Up Under the sunshine - Fang Fang, 2008

Ling Jian, Hero No. 5, 2008

Ling Jian, Mini book, 2008

Ling Jian’s art is a carefully negotiated hybridization calibrated to his expressive concerns. Having lived and worked between China and Europe for 20 years, Ling’s struggle deals with the fact that “home” is no longer a refuge, but has become part of the stage. Ling’s paintings bear many of the earmarks, stylistic and expressive, with which we have come to associate in Western figurative art. Given its pop-art antecedents and its sensitivity to current social conditions, Ling’s art finds continuity between the two cultural poles and locates itself in between.

The sharp and theatrical, yet casually presented violence that pervades Ling’s paintings of women is made possible by the acceptability 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. In Ling’s knowing recontextualization, the violence is part of his immersive conjuration of sexuality and provocation of desire. With their swollen heads, elongated necks and limbs, odd gestures, and tendency to weep bodily fluids other than tears, his subjects are mannerist caricatures, surrealized parodies. They amplify secondary sexual characteristics according to contemporary tastes; but more often deliberately overshoot those tastes, resulting in frightening enactments of the appearance disorders that plague young women today.

Ling’s paintings for the exhibition Red Seed will be on display from November 22, 2008 through January 17, 2009. Send Email - www.df2gallery.com

Ling Jian, Propaganda Party, 2008

Ling Jian, Red Pupa, 2008

Ling Jian, Revolution Madonna No. 2, 2008