Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, stop being amazed by these oil paintings of Leng Jun that make you drool like teenagers in front of a brand new touch screen. You have been swooning for a decade over his hyperrealistic portraits that have conquered the Chinese market with the subtlety of a bulldozer in a porcelain shop. The artist has become the darling of collectors for whom technical virtuosity equals intellectual depth. What a monumental mistake!
But let’s be clear: the technical skill of Leng Jun is undeniable. Born in 1963 in Sichuan province, this man possesses an obsessive precision that would make an electron microscope jealous. His female portraits, notably the series of “Little”, such as “Little Xiang”, “Little Tang” or the famous “Little Wen” which sold for the modest sum of 7.5 million euros, are of a hallucinatory minutiae where every pore of skin, every strand of hair is rendered with surgical exactitude.
The question that haunts me, and should obsess all of you, is the following: why the hell spend nine months painting what a camera can capture in a millisecond? Leng Jun’s answer deserves our attention: “What the human eye sees is fundamentally different from what a camera captures.” This statement brings us directly to the heart of visual phenomenology and invites us to reconsider our relationship with perception.
Leng Jun forces us to confront our sensory experience with our understanding of representation. His works function as perceptual experiments that strangely remind us of Maurice Blanchot’s meditations on the image. For Blanchot, the image is not the simple reproduction of an object but rather what remains when the object has disappeared. “The image demands the neutrality and erasure of the world,” he wrote, suggesting that the authentic image does not reproduce the visible but makes it visible [1]. Leng Jun, through his relentless practice, does not seek to photograph but to bring forth a visual truth that only the human eye, with its imperfections and particularities, can grasp.
This phenomenological dimension of his work is particularly striking in his series of bamboos. These paintings, which subtly evoke the tradition of Chinese ink painting, offer a subtle meditation on perception and representation. Leng Jun’s bamboos are not simple botanical reproductions; they become explorations of the limits of vision and representation, objects of contemplation that invite us to slow down our frenetic gaze to rediscover the very act of seeing.
But let’s not be fooled: what makes Leng Jun’s work so provocative is precisely its ambiguous position in the contemporary artistic landscape. His hyperrealism appears as an anachronism in the era of instant digital reproduction, as a gesture of resistance against the vertiginous speed of image production in today’s China. This temporal resistance echoes Paul Virilio’s reflections on acceleration and disappearance. Virilio warned us about how speed reconfigures our perception of the world: “Speed reduces the world to nothing” [2]. In this perspective, Leng Jun’s obstinacy in spending months on a single canvas can be read as a deliberate act of sabotage against the regime of instantaneity that governs our visual era.
Leng Jun’s obsession with detail is reminiscent of Freud’s uncanny. His portraits are so real that they become unreal, tipping into what Freud called the “unheimlich”, that familiarity which becomes a source of discomfort precisely because it is too familiar. The faces of his models stare at us with an intensity bordering on the unbearable, as if we were confronted with perfect doubles whose very perfection reveals their fundamental artificiality.
To fully understand the significance of Leng Jun’s work, it must be placed in the context of Chinese art history. Trained in the academic traditions inherited from socialist realism, he experienced the tumultuous transition to a consumerist China. His work, particularly his early series such as “Red Star” or “Vestiges, New Product Design”, reflects this tension between revolutionary heritage and the emergence of a consumer society. These more conceptual and critical works of the 1990s contrast with his later hyperrealistic portraits, revealing an artist who consciously navigates between social critique and technical virtuosity.
Leng Jun’s artistic trajectory raises essential questions about the very notion of progress in art. While the narrative of modern Western art history has been built on a series of breaks with the past, Leng Jun offers a different, more cyclical model, where the return to tradition can constitute a radical gesture. This approach echoes Virilio’s reflections on the “accidents” of progress: each technological advance simultaneously produces its own potential catastrophe [3]. In this perspective, Leng Jun’s obsessive hyperrealism could be interpreted as the specific accident of our era of hyper-digital reproduction.
Beyond their technical virtuosity, Leng Jun’s female portraits raise troubling questions about the male gaze in contemporary Chinese art. These idealized women, depicted in artificial perfection, can be seen as a continuation of a long tradition of objectifying feminine beauty in art. Paradoxically, the extreme precision of their representation dehumanizes them, transforming them into inaccessible icons rather than living subjects.
What is truly intriguing about his work is not so much his ability to reproduce the real but his ability to question our relationship with the real. Leng Jun does not simply paint what he sees; he paints our way of seeing, with all its limitations and particularities. His canvases thus become archives of the act of perception itself, documents that testify not so much to the visible world as to our way of perceiving it.
Leng Jun’s obsession with detail also evokes what Blanchot called “waiting”, that suspension of time which precedes revelation. “Waiting cannot wait itself”, he wrote, suggesting that the act of waiting creates a particular space-time where possibilities remain open [4]. Leng Jun’s painting, in its deliberate slowness, creates precisely this type of waiting, a space of contemplation that resists the rapid consumption of images.
Let’s talk now about his place in the art market. In 2019, “Mona Lisa, about the design of the smile” sold for 9 million euros, followed by “Little Wen” which reached 10 million. These astronomical figures reflect less the intrinsic artistic value of these works than the perverse dynamics of a Chinese market in search of secure values. Leng Jun’s hyperrealism offers the guarantee of a visually impressive, technically unassailable and culturally ambiguous investment, traditional enough to reassure conservative collectors and virtuosic enough to impress novices.
The fundamental ambiguity of Leng Jun’s work lies in its position at the crossroads of multiple traditions and influences. On the one hand, it is part of the lineage of traditional Chinese painters for whom technical mastery was inseparable from spiritual cultivation. On the other hand, it adopts the visual codes of Western hyperrealism, while diverting them to create a distinctly Chinese aesthetic. This cultural hybridity makes his work a privileged site for exploring the tensions between tradition and modernity in contemporary China.
What fundamentally differentiates Leng Jun from other hyperrealists like Chuck Close is his relationship with time. While Close used photography as a starting point to then move away from it in a process of deconstruction, Leng Jun starts with the direct observation of the model and engages in a process of patient intensification. His work is not so much a reproduction as an augmentation of the real, an amplification that makes visible what the eye perceives but ordinary consciousness does not notice.
The question we must ask ourselves is not whether Leng Jun is a great artist, his technical mastery is undeniable, but rather what his success tells us about our era and our relationship with the image. In a world saturated with manipulated and ephemeral digital images, Leng Jun’s meticulous hyperrealism offers a seductive counterpoint: the promise of an authentic image, created by the human hand with monastic patience. This promise, as illusory as it may be (for any representation is by definition a construction), responds to a deep nostalgia for a more direct and slower relationship with the visible.
If Blanchot invites us to see the image as what remains when the object has disappeared, Leng Jun’s paintings could be understood as attempts to capture what disappears in the photographic image: duration, sustained attention, the subjectivity of the human gaze. These qualities, which constitute the very essence of perceptual experience, are precisely what mechanical reproduction cannot grasp.
What makes Leng Jun’s work so interesting and so problematic is precisely its ability to blur the boundary between reproduction and creation. His paintings force us to reconsider what it means to see and represent in a world where the distinction between real and virtual becomes increasingly tenuous. They confront us with the strange truth that Virilio had sensed: the more our ability to reproduce the real becomes perfect, the more the real itself becomes elusive.
The ultimate paradox of Leng Jun is perhaps this: by pushing realistic representation to its extreme limits, he ends up revealing its fundamental impossibility. Hyperrealism, pushed to its paroxysm, tips into the surreal, reminding us that any representation is never more than an approximation, an interpretation, a fiction, no matter how meticulous.
Leng Jun, with his severe myopia, literally paints blindly, his nose almost touching the canvas. This biographical anecdote becomes a metaphor: the artist who sees better than anyone is also the one who can only see from very close, in an extremely limited field. Is this not the perfect image of our contemporary condition, where the hypervisibility of the world coincides with a new blindness to its complexity?
- Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Gallimard, 1955.
- Virilio, Paul. The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Éditions Galilée, 1989.
- Virilio, Paul. The Original Accident. Éditions Galilée, 2005.
- Blanchot, Maurice. Waiting Forgetting. Gallimard, 1962.
