“Your Body”, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, 2006

Invited by Shanghai Art Museum, Xiang Jing shows her “Keep in Silence” series at two gigantic main exhibition halls on the first floor of Shanghai Art Museum, with the addition of a group of smaller-scale works from an earlier period. This composition is to depict the personal and artistic growth of the artist. The curator is Jiang Mei and the exhibition is titled “Your Body”.

The British-style architecture of Shanghai Art Museum dates from 1930s. The two gigantic exhibition halls facing each other on the ground floor are extremely challenging to show the artworks.

At this exhibition, as one enters the main entrance, on one side of the mounted wall functioned as an entryway, Gift by Xiang Jing created in 2002 is placed right there with a big grin on her face. On the other side of the mounted wall is a documentary produced by the artist herself. In the north-side main exhibition hall, the four-meter tall And You? welcomes all whilst Your Body and Heaven form a theme on the “body” together. They are surrounded by a number of smaller-scale works Xiang Jing created in the 1990s, borrowed from different collectors for this exhibition. In the south-side exhibition hall, the “Virgin Series” is the main body of works displayed, with several works from “Keep in Silence” and “Mirror Image” distributed across rest of the exhibition space. Overall, the two exhibition halls form a dialogue between them, against the classical - styled architecture of Shanghai Art Museum - thus the spirit of our contemporary age and our humanity form a spectacle of tension at this exhibition.

Initiated by Shanghai Art Museum, some of the most important curators and critics in China are invited to