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 contribution to figuration that Xiang Jing decided to summon from her own resources, and to which she could bend her skills. These latter strands of her approach are significant as they are conscious efforts: the work is not this way due to a straightforward facility with materials or form that is taken for granted. The choice is also informed by the fact of Xiang Jing being a woman herself—it is unlikely these pieces could have been conceived by a man. It is, therefore, an issue. China’s women artists have to fight harder to achieve real critical credibility. This is something Xiang Jing acknowledges, which makes it all the more frustrating when kind words are used to mask critical comment, in case the criticism proves upsetting to delicate female feelings. The truth might hurt, yes, but if you were to express distaste for Xiang Jing’s approach, she would not cry about like a child. She would simply work out what she thinks, what she ought to learn from it, and plough this awareness into the next work by whatever means she deemed appropriate.
Beijing-born Xiang Jing entered the preparatory school of the capital’s Central Academy of Fine Arts in the mid-1980s, The preparatory school was located in the heart of Beijing, one street away from the China Art Gallery (renamed the National Art Museum of China in 2001). An adventurous and inquisitive individual, Xiang Jing was particularly affected by the new cultural ideas, and fragments of western ideology that being introduced to what had long been a closed society, and which were having a great impact on all students. Xiang Jing saw those exhibitions held in Beijing that would shape the future of art in China.