CHEN Lingyang (???) (Born 1975)

Chen Lingyang was born in Zhejiang Province in 1975, and she studied in the Affliated High School of China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, and Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. She now lives in Beijing.

Chen Lingyang mainly works with installation and photography, and her works usually explore the beauty of female bodies and their intrinsic meanings. In one of her major photography works, “Twelve Flower Months”, what audience see through the traditional Chinese mirrors are no longer the "beautiful" faces and bodies we are accustomed to, but the female sex organs in menstruation. The traditional poetic Chinese concept of twelve flower months provides a metaphor for the female physiological truth of menstruation through the twelve months of the year. With the traditional Chinese forms of ancient mirrors and garden windows, gentle and sober disposal of light and color around the sexual organs, directness of menstrual blood and stimulation, Chen Lingyang breaks the tradition in a seemingly traditional way and destroys the "femininity" with a seemingly "feminine" approach. The direct selection of the female topic, the attention to both "truth" and "beauty" of female bodies, and the utilization of Chinese traditions and feminine form are all skillfully and consciously presented.

(credit: Liao Wen, Female Bodies: Truth and Beauty Chen Lingyang's "Twelve Flower Months" and the Self-consciousness of Female Mode. http://galerie-meile.ch/ChenLingyang/ChenLingyang.htm)