Yang Na's paintings caricature the women of sexual fantasy. She depicts them with oversized heads and proportionally tiny bodies. Their feminine features are exaggerated by cosmetic enhancements: false eyelashes and nails, plucked and penciledin brows, deeply shadowed lids, and mouths colored with glossy red Lipstick. Their unlined, perfectly smooth skin has a porcelain qua[Ky giving them a doll-Like appearance. Their necks are wrapped, almost roped, with gaudy jewelry. Like Xiong Lijun's women, their eyes are huge and glassy but they are not expressionless. Yang Na's women are hyper-sexualized and self-absorbed. In Fate From the Mirror a woman plants a kiss upon her mirrored self and then looks coyly at the viewer. The woman in The Smell of Love deeply inhales a cigarette in the shape of a phallus, her eyes dosed in deep enjoyment.Smoke wafts sensuously upward from her open mouth. The perfectly manicured, blood-red nails are cLaw-like, suggestive of the power of female sexuality. The third painting in the series, A Cup of Yang Na, shows the same character, the alter ego of the artist. She is crying; her eyelashes are drooping and tears are rolling down her cheeks in a steady stream, filling a pair of toy teacups. Emblazoned with hearts, the teacups are a metaphor for the vulnerability and loss of innocence hidden below the glamorous sheen and sexual power.

　　Yang Na's ideal woman is drawn from a global cultural landscape of mass media and consumption, cartoons, movies,videos, Internet games and toys. The woman in her paintings especially resembles the avatars (the word "avatar" derives from the Sanskrit term AvatAra, meaning "incarnation") of online chat rooms and virtual games. As participants in these Internet communities we can create our physical identities by selecting from a menu of features, hairstyles and clothing. With her turned-up nose, blue-black eyes and rouged complexion, Yang Na's alter ego is not identifiable as being from any particular place or having a particular ethnicity.Rather, she is a composite of a commercial visual language of what is considered "sexy" and "trendy." In adopting hyper- sexualized attributes for her physical persona, the real Yang Na can indulge her fantasies about what it might be like to Live a more uninhibited life, free from moral strictures and consequences. Unlike Xiong Lijun's relentlessly upbeat images of trendy, youthful consumers, the sobbing alter ego in A Cup of Yang Na forces us to consider what lies beneath.

　　YANG NA AND ROY LICHTENSTEIN

　　Roy lichtenstein’s and yang Na’s interpretation of the Pop movement is a comic mirror of society.Both artists work in a visual language that encompasses music,consumerism and fashion,spotlighting an entire way of life among young people. Taking inspiration from Japanese animation and video avatars,the images projected in Yang Na’s Paintings are presented with,and sometimes fransformed by,the same humor,Wit,and irony as the comic renditions of Lichtenstein,Her work,like Lichtenstein’s may be read as both a palpable celebration of and an undeniable critique of popular culture.

　　I have been surrounded by art my whole life,even since my birth in a theatre during a performance! When I was three years old my family relocated to Chongqing to work at Sichuan Fine Arts College. For as long as I can remember, the female form. has fascinated me, its soft feminine beauty makes me feel at peace. Most of my understanding of the body and its sensuality comes from the rigid training I received from my master artist. Foreign movies have also had a great deal of influence on my work, inspiring "sexy" and "trendy" subjects. - Yang N