The Capital "WOMAN" – Xiang Jing's Body Narrative

of her own art, and the method with which she used to feel, experience and contemplate this world reflected a “female perspective”. As she put it, “when I made the Bath House in a classroom, I was the girl, covering herself while observing the adult world through a hostile eye.” The declaration itself – “I was the girl” – demonstrates exactly the “self-narrative” characteristic which is typical of the feminine art; “covering herself” suggests a sense of insecurity, which is unique to girls; “observing the adult world through a hostile eye” – the underages' hostility towards the grown-ups, is in fact a more definite female position, because a majority of the damaged underages are female, while the majority of the bullying adults are male. The physical and mental feelings of a disadvantaged individual (underage and female) revealed in Xiang Jing's works form a kind of narrative of experience which derives from her own body and, therefore, manifests an distinctive esthetic quality and spiritual dimension of the feminine art. Although Xiang Jing's works at that period appeared to be slightly immature, her artistic thinking based on her own experience had already demonstrated the direction in which her artistic career path will stretch.
I described the development of Chinese feminine art since 1949 as three stages: First, the “Pre-feminine Art” stage in the status of “non-self”：Representation of the external world without reference to the internal world and self experience; Second, a stage of “self-exploration”, or, a return to women themselves: diversion from the external to the internal, self-representation that exploits self experience and starts from the inner world; Third, the stage from “self-exploration” to “the Capital ME”: reflection upon the survival of the female group and the human race as well as the human nature, from a broad social-historical perspective, which begins from self experience. Xiang Jing's works in the past 20 years not only illustrate the second and third stages that Chinese female artists have gone through, but also become the main evidences in which I induced the two stages. After the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, contemporary art as a whole shows an inclination for returning to the self, or so-called “New Generation”, “Close-up”. It was on this road towards the self, the feminine art came into being. The