Xiang Jing / Beyond Sculpture

buildings join together to form a small community on the northeast city perimeter. Outside this quiet district is a scene of the inexorable expansion of the city in which old towns and villages are in a muddy and dusty transition. Xiang Jing and her husband Qu Guangci, who is also a sculptor, came here in early 2009. “We were very lucky”, Xiang Jing says musingly, “because the financial crisis happened at this time, artists who used to be in this area shifted about a lot, so we were able to rent one studio, then another one next to it and then another. We ended up with a 1300 square meter space.” They converted the space into a traditional style sculpture studio: a huge workshop for making, moulding and casting large pieces of sculpture, smaller rooms as private studios, a loft for her assistants to live in, and an exhibition hall. The relocation took them nearly a year as they moved from Shanghai which is 1400 kilometres away. All their works, some very large, had to be transported in huge lorries.
Xiang Jing does not seem to be afraid of this kind of laborious task. “We have got used to it.” That is how she put it. Since graduating from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, she and her husband have moved their studio several times and conditions were often not very good. But no matter how things change, Xiang Jing always settles in very quickly and resumes work right away. “We may move again you see”, she says in a matter-of-fact way, “we don’t know how long this Art District will exist. Therefore, we may have to move to the Song Village outside Beijing. Luckily for me, we don’t need to do it all by ourselves nowadays; we have got our assistants to help which is so great!” She takes a positive and rather philosophical approach, “The fate of an individual depends on the trend of the moment. Survival is the top priority. However, our ambitions have also grown as we have emerged from hardship to larger and better studios. We managed somehow to benefit from the opportunities that came from the so-called ‘rise of the nation’.” Indeed, Xiang Jing and Qu Guangci have stayed on and worked in China — a chaotic and topsy-turvy society during the economic reform era, and have emerged more mature and strong. So who is more deserving of a reward for the effort than them?