I was at the art museum when I happened upon a solo exhibition by Xiang Jing—Upon This Anguish I Repose. I was delighted and dazzled, and yet at the same time I found myself strangely at a loss for words. The words were there, a horde of them: nouns that aimed to define, adjectives that tried to describe, phrases long and short that might sketch what I was seeing – these welled up and were instantaneously blocked, and I remained speechless. This was because these words, though apt, were superfluous; though utterly correct, they fell far short of satisfactory; they derived from preconceived and derivative explanations, rather than from osmosis and emotional responses that come from bodily knowledge.
Female sculptor. This is an obvious fact, a prominent set of coordinates and parameters. The accent here falls on the attributive or modifier. Female, female artist, or feminist artist? At the very least, this artist and her oeuvre call for a feminist interpretation. One can tell just by looking that Keep in Silence (Fig. 1) and Naked Beyond Skin (Fig. 2), two of Xiang Jing’s most magnificent series (and every series that had preceded them), endorse the necessity and reasonableness of these coordinates. However, let us temporarily set aside the well-established abuses of 20th century “theory” and theoretical interpretations: in my view, to approach Xiang Jing’s work by way of preconceived explications would be like labeling her work and covering it over. A better approach is something like applying developing emulsion, which, while revealing words written in invisible ink, exposes at the same time a large blank expanse, full of splotches and messy erasures. To me, this is a very natural and familiar path; it’s as if, without even having a secret key in hand or knowing the code word, I am confident that I’ve already stepped through the hidden door that opens onto Xiang Jing’s world.
It goes without saying that Xiang Jing’s art is about women. However, the “female” here is not constrained by any sort of normative practice, nor does she arise intentionally from any position or ideology. “She” is not any kind of social category; she is neither a downtrodden nor worshipped object; she is neither an overlooked object nor one stared at so long she