It was in Qingdao when I first met Xiang Jing. I was planning for the "Chinese Contemporary Sculpture Invitational Exhibition", of which she was one of the participating artists. I still remember my first sight of her, her slim figure, too slender, even a little scrawny, and her fluffy hair waving around her eyes, which made them seem even larger. In the wafting of Qingdao’s sea breezes, she left me such an ethereal impression that reminded me of those celestial immortals, but as she talked her manner was rather bashful and gentle.
Her works during that time were mainly about the daily living conditions of urban girls, or in other words, they were a kind of portrayal of her personal experiences of growing up and living in metropolitan Beijing. What was prominent in the works was a sense of eccentricity and distortion mixed with the memories, pains, and decadence of youth. The aching sensation that she placed deeply in such feelings was molded so finely and subtly that the meanings of memories were then instilled with a sense of self-absorbed sentimentality – they were kind of “bourgeois”, in a way.
Later, she resigned from her job in Beijing, and went to teach in Shanghai Normal University with her husband. In the autumn of 2003, dozens of collateral exhibitions sprung up all out of a sudden during the Beijing International Art Biennale, like a festive “catwalk” for avant-garde arts. When I met Xiang Jing again during that time, she spoke out quite frankly: The collateral exhibitions of the Biennale are like a big party; a lot of artists only care about “being present,” and the petty “mind-tricks” they play are all very tedious. The art circles have been so exhausted! Nothing thrills. That’s the consequence of those “cool races” and “wit matches.” – she still clung tightly to the notion that art ought to be touching, “I want to make something that touches people.”
I did not quite agree with what she said. The very nature of the avant-garde lies in being experimental and critical, and in challenging and subverting conventional aesthetics, where there is more or less the connotation of the anti-visual. Although during such a process there were artists who willfully indulged in a strand of unnecessary eccentricity and novelty for but art’s sake, the significance of