BODY, AS A MEDIUM FOR ME, HAS POWER INSIDE IT.
Wei Xing: I noticed that some of your earlier works were about some girls and women, which are quite representational; but your works today are more and more emphasizing the form and nonrepresentational. Though they still actually have their five sense organs and the depiction of the parts of the body is also very delicate, the feeling that it gives me is that they are not specific individuals. And the so-called “nonrepresentational” means that you don’t portray the social identity of the figures, but to pay attention to such a kind of nonrepresentational expression. And the “nonrepresentational” refers to that they are not the presentation of specific figures, but humans of biological meaning, who have been deprived of their social role and are even neuter. I want to know what kind of factor has made you slowly change from the form in the past to such a direction now. Is it because of the growth of age, the accumulation of experience or the deepening and broadening of your cognition for life?
Xiang Jing: That’s true. When I started my artistic career, and even when I started creating this kind of human-sized works in 1998, I was still in a relatively vague status about doing art. I would surely do art. But how? I was still in a status, which was quite spontaneous and without a plan. So I had to rely on my own experience and the things related to me.
But from the group of works in my solo exhibition in 2005, "Keep in Silence", I started to obtain an awareness of self-consciousness. What you called the figures with social identities are, in my opinion, still connected with the part of experience. It’s just like what you see in your real life. I have to base on such a carrier. I need this visual and sensible life to reflect the world in my eyes. The spiritual situation of the people in our time is right under such skin. In that exhibition, there were actually several works, such as Your Body, which had surmounted such kind of narration. It’s quite representative. It integrated many factors together. It had a nature of purity. Though it was an anti-conceptual work, it has become a work with a strong concept for that. All kinds of factors were interconnected then and therefore such a powerful work was created. It couldn’t have been done in the