Xiang Jing – Say It Loud

Karen Smith

Xiang Jing is an unusually independently-minded young Chinese woman. Her personality is a blend of bohemian free spirit and down-to-earth common sense, underscored by a feisty mental attitude towards life and art. Life saw fit to place this personality in a delicate physical frame, and set behind a pair of large round eyes, the innocence of which belies this woman’s talent for penetrating insight. Where, to date, Xiang Jing’s art has focused on the female form, the woman’s body has evolved as a conduit for her observations on the state of women in contemporary China: observations that, in early 2008, she decided to draw together in one exhibition, and to act as a denouement for this phase of her career. Having reached a certain maturity, Xiang Jing feels it is time to move onto something new.
But before that happens… the distinctive nature of Xiang Jing’s ‘portraits’ of womanhood asks us to paint a similar portrait of herself against which to compare and contrast the work, and to affirm the truth of her vision. Xiang Jing’s sculptures beg investigation: to be regarded closely, for their every expression demands attention, suggesting the need to be acknowledged entirely in terms of themselves by all viewers who encounter them. It is not a task to suit every taste. Xiang Jing’s women are far from being iconic beauties, nor the voluptuous or lithe nymphs of conventional figurative sculpture. For a start they are perversely normal. They are also entirely unadorned, and laid bare, not just in their nakedness but from underneath the skin. The exterior posture has metaphoric resonance with the psychological states Xiang Jing seeks to express. As a result, these figures, either individually or in groups, are utterly arresting, taunting our penchant for morbid fascination with human flesh, the body, the sexual attributes of gender, and ultimately our awareness of mortality.
This emphasis on the everyday aspects of human presence in the work, on brutish realism in depicting the flesh and imperfections, is a fundamental concern of Xiang Jing’s approach. How else to understand the outrageous in-your-face stances which these figures adopt, or the explicit exposure to which she subjects her female models. This choice represents the result of much thinking, sculptural practice, and questioning of the value of artistic expression, and of the