Poetics and Politics of Body – About Xiang Jing’s Recent Works

sculptures, a series of monologs about the body. They are no longer portraits or anyone’s life, which would remind us of any momentary scene or time. They are alive beyond reality; the bodies interpret themselves, as “the ego of the body”. These sculptures are sitting or standing, gazing at us, forcing everyone into the retrospection of his own body, its history and destiny.

THE HISTORY OF THE BODY
The Greece showed their perfect body in burliness and handiness. Body is the living plants, bestrewed on earthen pots, on mural paintings, on marble base, thriving in spring and abundant in autumn. It implicates the mysterious laws of the nature, which is the law of all lives. In the dogma of the early Christianity, body is the model of the cosmos. Instead of the scientific nature that we see now, it is the consummate design of God. Nothing else in the secular world can compare to that perfect design, and everything is just handicapped and indigent under that comparison.
The sin described in the Holy Bible is about human being’s knowledge of his body. After Adam and Eve stole and ate the fruit from the tree of life, they saw each other’s naked body, and were ashamed of showing them to the all-mighty God. After driven out from the Garden of Eden, male and female sewed the fig leaves to cover their private parts. Hence, they are never naked again, and the body becomes secrecy and privacy. However, nude is not the executants of the penalty according to the JHVH’s sentence. The body is thus heavy, debilitated, hungry and mortal when paradise is lost. Decrepitude, diseases and death thus overcome the body.
The Greeks appreciate the body which is harmonious and coordinate with the soul, endowing it with dignity, beauty and vitality. In the pictures of the Greeks, as what Rainer Maria Rilke says, “In den Vasenbildern, diesen unvergeßlichen Erinnerungen aus einer großen Zeichenkunst, ist die Umgebung (Haus oder Straße) nur genannt, gleichsam abgekürzt, nur mit dem Anfangsbuchstaben angegeben, die nackten Menschen sind alles, sind wie Bäume, die Früchte tragen und Fruchtkränze, und wie Büsche, die blühen, und wie Frühlinge, in denen die Vögel singen. Damals