Only her body ---- Kong Lingnan

I don't know since when the neon effect started to appearing in art and dance. Last year in America's got talent, a dance group called Fighting Gravity used neon effect in their dance, and this year another dance group Team Illuminate did the silimar thing, they wore some sort of reflecting material, outlining their body with the shapes they wanted, and then danced in a completely dark stage, so people can only see the movements of the neon shapes as they dance around. It is so magical, almost like a fantasy.

Then I found the same concept used in art by a female Chinese artist Kong Lingnan, the effect looks exact the same as in the dance.

She named the exibition "Only her body", and here is her explanation for the title: 'Only Her Body doesn’t refer to the feminine body—it projects the world, the universe, the feminine aura. I think we only see the world we want to see, so we build up all kinds of systems to fit our perception. I ask myself: What is the real face of the world? There shouldn’t be [only] kind and evil, or beauty and ugliness—just the world itself.'

Seeing the work, I personally don't get either the title or her explanation. The work seems to solely use neon to tell a story, a story of people working or camping north or south poles in the mountains covered with snow.

The clean lines created by the neon lights surely fits people's imagination of the romote, isolated space and mountiains of the north poles; The dark background adds loneliness and maybe a little mystery to our imagination.

To me, she did simply depict the beauty of the world, not 'just the world itself'.

If she just wants to depict the world itself, I think maybe it's best to create different scenes with different location, time, and figures instead of telling what seems to me a coherent story.

It is amazing that she didn't really use neon lights as the media for this project, she just used normal oil paint, the contrast of the different colors created the neon effect. I have no idea how the whole thing works since I don't paint and know nothing about painting. To me, it is very creative to use oil paint this way, it's very new and modern. It kind of twists people's traditional aesthetic appreciation of painting and adds more fun.