Inside of Language, Outside of History

ultimately becomes a subject. “She” is not merely an overflowing abundance, or an uninhibited and silent site. As a figurative, even “realistic” sculptor, when Xiang Jing mounts exhibits, what the viewer sees are sometimes massive, sometimes meticulously detailed, female bodies – you are in the presence of a prominent materiality. With a few noticeable exceptions, these figures are unrestrained and full of vitality, with a fierce sense of solitude and a stubborn aloofness. Xiang Jing’s creations, from the early days to the peak of her career, have poured out almost continuously, one series after another. The impetus is less a provocation or castigation of patriarchy than an old personal diary: a record of one person’s life, her growing up, her changing body, her secrets, experiences she never set down in words, which language is not even able to convey. From little girl to young woman, from youth to womanhood, and ultimately old age . . . the uncontrollable turmoil, restlessness, and anxieties around “growing up.” Perhaps the temptation to offer a gendered or feminist interpretation of Xiang Jing’s work arises from this: although women have been ceaselessly written about, painted, sung about, or reviled, the complete and uninterrupted life stories of women have almost never been presented. Girl or maiden, maiden or young matron, mature woman or mother or crone – each one possesses an inexhaustible well of stories and infinite guises; but with the exception of miscellaneous individual biographies or biographical stories, the social discourse around women is segmented into disparate heterogeneous fragments: menarche; weddings and the marital bed (“they lived happily ever after”); childbearing and childrearing; aging and the loss of sexuality . . . While this happened under the aegis of the patriarchal system, and women, their images, and their writing only functionally existed in relation to the male subject/s, over the course of the 20th century, women’s writing and writing about women were still unable to break free of this fragmentation and self-isolation. The reasons for this are not just that under the constraints of patriarchy, “liberated women” lacked the means to effect a distinctly female subjectivity; other causes lie within so-called “women’s culture” itself, which had yet to be imbedded in women’s language. They said: “We still don’t have the wherewithal to open up another sky