Silent Elles

experiences are the most immediate inspirations for artistic production. Experiences are usually more vivid and more powerful than some of the fabricated figures. However, the way she produces art is not confined to the so-called traditional concepts, but inclusive of her questioning of the traditional mode of fiction, since reality has been far from what we had treated as reality in the past, and the new objects and new incidents that come about in our everyday life are much stranger and more extraordinary than the most careful of artistic fabrications.
However, her apparent realism does not mean that she has renounced fiction and imagination, or that they are purely empirical recordings, but it has ascertained a contact point between the aforementioned dualistic narrative modes. Two points are especially vital here. First, Xiang’s self-conscious observation and experience of reality go beyond the creative routine of ordinary artists. Second, she effaces elements traditional to realism, i.e. portrayal of typical figures, and emphasis on the fate of a single protagonist; instead, she concentrates on an integral grasp of the growing up of women.
She enjoys the external aspects of life in our harsh society. She takes interest in the various lively and vigorous ways in which men and women react to social and personal transformations. What exists exist for a reason, and as a result, balance, symmetry, and order come to be in this world. Likewise, such an orderly aesthetic is also found in Xiang Jing’s artistic world, although what happens in the latter represent her stories of her own. As for Xiang, concept might mean a specific scene, person, and relations between people. In fact, the sensibility and attention towards sculptural language itself equal an attention paid towards the instinctive call of life deep within one’s soul, which can be regarded as a symbol of a transition from women’s writing to actively speaking.
A mixed, subtle relationship is formed between time and space, and different women at the present moment through her creativity. What is real? What is expression? These questions sink and fade in her almost fictional figures. This shows that as Xiang Jing’s works cross over and go beyond the pursuit of “realistic emulation”; and in a new context, they traverse, decompose, and re-combine freely, and