Xiang Jing: Gazing from the Screen

Gary G. Xu

In appreciating Taiwanese director Edward Yang’s masterpiece A One and A Two, Xiang Jing (born 1968) specifically points out the camera given by the father to the son as a present: “The camera basically becomes a means by which the boy looks at the world. Eventually it can even express his feelings and his reactions to the outside world. I really like this gesture that symbolizes ‘gazing’. If we cannot get a grasp on how to view our relationship with the outside world, why don’t we try to find an aid like the boy does? This aid is like a passage, a path, linking you with the world; you may take the path and reach the true in your eyes. Who am I? Where do I come from? Where do I go? These eternal questions can all be addressed by finding a basic model through the visual aid; answers will be slowly built up. We may believe in our own eyes, but sometimes your observation of your inner self and of others around you can only become a complete world through the slowly built-up answers to those questions.”  
This monologue is the key to understanding Xiang Jing’s art. For the older-generation contemporary Chinese artists, those who were among the first group of college graduates after the Cultural Revolution, Van Gogh was their idol because Van Gogh’s suffering was reminiscent of their miseries when growing up. The ultimate modernist must be modeled after the image of an individualistic martyr, who burns the miseries in creative ecstasy. For Xiang Jing, her circumstances were far more different. Born to a mother who is an established literature magazine editor and a father who became the head of a major film studio, Xiang Jing was a Beijing girl growing up in material comfort and high cultural surroundings.  And her career has also been relatively smooth. However, if we base our judgment of Xiang Jing solely on these circumstances, we could not have been more wrong. Yes, Xiang Jing had a happy and secure childhood, which is best captured in her work I Have Seen Happiness; and yes, her family background has trained her well in her tremendous literary sensibility. But this does not mean that she lacks motivation in embodying pain, unhappiness, the abnormal, or the abject. Quite to the contrary, her ability to observe the most minute of details and her rich imagination enable her to “borrow” a pair of eyes, e.g., the boy’s camera, as the means by which she