From Body to Nude

salient example is Your Body.
In 2005, when Xiang Jing held her "Keep in Silence" solo exhibition at Art Seasons Gallery in Beijing, the piece Your Body became the focus of attention. No viewer failed to be impressed by "her" large physical mass and all-out self-exposure. "She" is solidly built, assumes a stiff posture, and shows a trace of uneasiness in her features. Her eyes are opened over-widely as if startled. Her legs are spread, exposing her genitals to the observer's gaze. For viewers this female corporeal body does not bring about a pleasant viewing experience. Her manner and posture evoke a nervous atmosphere, and her exposed privates are a rankling point in the visual field, discomfiting yet inescapable. "She" is amply endowed by not shapely. Her coarse joints, thick limbs, scarred abdomen and stiff posture, along with her somber features, hint that this female's body is definitely not from the upper class of society. This body can only belong to a woman who is quite ordinary. Ordinary would usually imply normal and mediocre, but creative portrayal of the ordinary cannot get away with being lax and slapdash. Ordinariness may even be harder to capture than exceptional qualities. What is highlighted in Your Body is a painstaking depiction of ordinariness, in which inscription of details was done with considerable care. Only someone well-versed in semiotics of the body can accurately express a body which is characteristically ordinary, and Xiang Jing has undoubtedly mastered this kind of semiotics. Many interpreters think that Your Body reveals a feminist message which challenges male domination of society, and this seems to have become the accepted interpretation of the piece. Actually, our gaze can only rest on "her" surface and notice the bleak traces that mar it. These traces bespeak a discomfiting reality. It just so happens that these traces are conveyed by means of a female body. In this sense we can understand Xiang Jing's comment: "This is also a male body."
Xiang Jing has created various kinds of bodies which are filled with richly expressive details. Through these details one gets a sense that a particular body is overflowing with material for stories. Even so, Xiang Jing was not satisfied with a wholly empirical approach to creative work. Although she