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In "The Last Idealism", Galerie Volker Diehl is presenting, for the first time, works by Chinese artist Ling Jian that could hardly be more controversial in their iconography. Deliberately yet with an apparent naivety, Ling Jian plays with notions of beauty, youth, love, eternity, transience and death, those opposites that also surround us, as a western audience, in our everyday lives. These are personified by near "divine" dream-like young beauties, larger than life and right in front of our eyes – and yet seemingly so far away. Gracious, willowy female bodies lasciviously posed, incredibly attractive erotic glances and gestures – and yet, because they question the substance of ethical values, they force open a gap, create a distance. In playing so masterfully with modern western modes of depiction and eastern aesthetics, Ling Jian has endowed his paintings with their own unique inner tension.