Skylight onto the True Abyss

itself, and I have enough limitations of my own, it’s gotten to a point where I have to make some readjustments.
In all of my work—from “Mirror Image” to “Keep in Silence” and including “Naked Beyond Skin”—there has been a core. This core is my individual point of view; every issue is connected to me as an individual. No matter who you are, or where you grew up, in other words, no matter what the relationship is between you and the world, it is from this fulcrum, this perspective, that I approach things.

Guo: Would you say that the crux of this work is built on individual subjectivity?

Xiang: Yes, subjectivity is something that it’s taken me a long time to acknowledge and that I’m perpetually constructing. My thought process around deconstructing this fulcrum began with the series “Will Things Ever Get Better?” To be sure, it wasn’t very well executed, but for me it marked progress and was a big step forward. For someone like me, who has so many limitations, dismantling this fulcrum was extremely important. Actually, when I made the piece The Open for “Naked Beyond Skin” I was already planning to move away from what you would call subjectivity. My intention was to make things that were transcendent, to no longer create work that was so closely connected to my personal experience. When I made “Will Things Ever Get Better?” the idea was to incorporate topics that were more collective in nature.

Guo: You became more interested in others?

Xiang: “Mirror Image,” “Keep in Silence,” and “Naked Beyond Skin” are all concerned with collective problems. But I approached “Will Things Ever Get Better?” with an even larger idea in mind, that of Fate [or Destiny]. In creating “S”, I wanted to make something more complex and more ambiguous. For one thing, looking back on “Will Things Ever Get Better?” I concluded that I was trying too hard to make the structure clear, and it felt forced. There were lots of problems with the approach. In the current series, I want to get back to the perceptual tonalities of my work. Of course, I will definitely continue to probe