BEIJING- Moon in Glass , a new series of works by artist Ling Jian, employs portraiture, mirrors, installation and spatial design to create a seamless visual experience and an atmosphere that invites contemplation. Moon in Glass is actually two exhibitions being held consecutively at Today Art Museum and UCCA under a shared title.

During three decades of living in Vienna, Hamburg and Berlin, Ling Jian became well-known for his ambiguously seductive portraits of beautiful women and androgynous men. Since returning to China in 2003, he has increasingly turned his attention to conceptualizing the contemporary Chinese identity. In Moon in Glass , he expands his repertoire to portraiture printed on specially-manufactured coloured mirrors. Ling Jian's "angels" are both hyperrealistic and stylistically exaggerated: their broad foreheads, narrow chins, full lips and wide eyes reflect modern standards of beauty and shades of cultural identity. Reproducing their portraits on moon-shaped glass creates a dual distortion, heightening the abstraction and transforming angels into not-so-angelic vehicles of identity, vessels of information in an increasingly abstract age. As we draw closer, their portraits begin to dissipate, replaced by our own reflected images, insecurities and private self-portraits.

In Milan Kundera's acceptance speech for the 1985 Jerusalem Prize, he quoted an ancient Jewish proverb: "Man thinks, God laughs." According to Kundera, the more we think, the further we get from truth, the more our minds diverge. This is worth remembering as we examine the differing critical interpretations of Ling Jian's work. His ambiguous, highlyexpressive portraits of beautiful women and androgynous men have been described, variously, as kitsch, hyper-realist, low-brow and new-brow.

In his Moon in Glass exhibition at UCCA, Ling Jian hints at the complex inner psyche of his subjects; their faces and facial expressions offer up a jumble of conflicting testimony. His portraits can be seductive, aloof, mournful or disturbing, but all reveal a range of visual cues that cannot be deciphered with simple reason or rationality. Like a hunter in search of his prey, Ling Jian leverages personal experience and an understanding of human nature to capture images and transform them into symbols of our fast-paced age. If we attempt to think our way to an understanding of his work, to ponder its symbolism or assign it value, we will surely set God laughing again. Some things are better felt than thought, better experienced viscerally than interpreted rationally.

In mirroring the never-ending dynamic between self-image and society, Moon in Glass describes a circle that is both personal and collective, infinite yet circumscribed.

ARTIST STATEMENT
All of the works on display in my UCCA exhibition Moon in Glass are circular. Circular shapes create an infinite visual continuity, while the combination of painted canvases and printed mirrors leads to spatial illusions. The women in the paintings are representative of our times, representative of the standards applied to women in our times. They reflect the cultural shifts, clashes, contradictions historical scars and individual stories taking place within a given landscape. The use of mirrors emphasizes the harmony between audience and artwork, viewer and viewed. Portraits on canvas will be printed on mirrors. As the observer gazes at them from different angles, the works change appearance, depending on the refraction of light through coloured glass. As we draw closer to the mirrored surfaces, human instinct and experience ensure that the images within them will begin to dissipate. In this new kind of visual experience, we observe the minute interactions that define the subtle dynamic between self and society. Even as we are facing reality, we are fleeing from reality.