"Xiang Jing: Through No One's Eyes But My Own" Opens at The Long Museum (West Bund) in Shanghai

2017-12

Xiang Jing is the fourth artist to be invited to mount a show at the Long Museum (West Bund) this year, and the first woman artist to be given a large-scale solo exhibition at the museum.“Xiang Jing: Through No One's Eyes But My Own,”a comprehensive retrospective spanning over twenty years of her artistic output, opens at the Long Museum in December of 2017. The 2017 exhibition program at the Long Museum will come to a perfect conclusion with Xiang Jing's exhibition.

The artist's five core thematic series—Mirror Image” (1999-20020, “Keep in Silence” (2003-2005), “Naked Beyond Skin” (2006-2008), “Will Things Ever Get Better?” (2009-2011), and “S” (2012-2016)—along with a group of smaller, pedestal-mounted pieces collectively titled “I Have Seen Happiness” (2002-2010), were first shown together in Beijing in 2016. Now these works are poised to take on the city of Shanghai, where Xiang Jing once spent a decade. Moreover, these pieces will be joined by others that have never been shown before, making this exhibition Xiang Jing’s largest since her graduation from the Central Academy of Fine Art in 1995.

Since its opening in 2012, the Long Museum (West Bund), with its lucidly articulated fair face architectural space consisting of two levels and a stair-stepped main gallery, has hosted invited exhibitions of works by Chinese and Western artists working in a variety of media. But how to bring such a vast and challenging space into harmony with more two decades of artworks? How can we be drawn in and enticed to view these works anew? For the first time, an artist will be utilizing all three levels of the Long Museum's exhibition space.

In the Long Museum exhibition, Xiang Jing renders the space itself a central topic. Periodicized contextualization of the artworks via documentation no longer constitutes the only way in for the viewer. The line of chronology broken, these works can be encountered in an entirely new space, and the subject of the gaze can be restored to each viewer, with the body of each viewer becoming the true measure of scale for artworks and gallery space. The artist hopes that these artworks will belong to the physical response of each viewer and to their enchantment with the experience of being in the physical presence of the objects. This is precisely what Xiang Jing has more than once described as the "sensory apprehension" of art, something that in a sense lies beyond textual explication and which demonstrates as well how crucial it is to see works in person when it comes to validating art. This moment reveals that the sphere of art lies inside the viewer.

With the opening of this exhibition, twenty-one years of Xiang Jing's creative work is published in Xiang Jing: A Complete Collection. The three-volume catalogue, published by CITIC Press, includes a catalogue of Xiang Jing’s sculptures, a volume of essays and documentation, and a volume of annotations. A group of writers, including Fan Jingzhong, Dai Jinhua, Jonathan Feinberg, and Michael Kahn-Ackermann, have contributed essays and interviews composed or conducted specifically for this publication.