. . . between “reality” on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic. And – I would argue as well – all love.[1] – Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
The kneeling figure in Xiang Jing’s two-part sculpture, Peacocks (refer to p. 218) of 2007, has a wide-eyed look of astonishment. Her mouth drops open as she takes in her breath. With her left hand, she reaches back, balancing on her heel. Her right hand hovers tentatively at her side, open, in a gesture on the verge of a response (not yet formulated). The other figure – seated, resting on one arm with her legs out to the side – seems entirely lost in her thoughts. Her body is less mature than that of the kneeling figure and her pink, almost transparently “luminous”[2] skin, as the artist herself described it, makes this figure appear painfully delicate, susceptible, radically exposed. These naked, hairless bodies (without so much as an eyelash) point to a vulnerability where the inner self and the world touch, or almost touch – a preternatural sensitivity that characterizes all of Xiang Jing’s work. The figures plead for us to acknowledge them for what they are; their state of being is their subject. “I am deeply concerned with issues of self-acknowledgment and growth, self-awareness (‘who am I?’ – the essential existential question),” Xiang Jing explained.[3]
Born into an intellectual family in Beijing, in 1968, Xiang Jing has said that she already knew as a child that she wanted to be an artist.[4] Her brother has a literary gift, writing children’s books and poetry, her father wrote film theory and scripts, her mother edited contemporary fiction for the venerable People’s Literature, the first literary magazine to be created in communist China (1949). Xiang Jing recalls, at the age of five, drawing with a pencil on the wall of the family’s home; she drew as high as she could reach – with her mother’s encouragement![5] These are important touchstones of a childhood as remembered, looking back through the scrim of forty years. Xiang Jing went to the High School Attached to the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing