THIN-SKINNED
It is perhaps about surfaces, membranes and layers of pigment – about a realism bound, not to specific individuals, but to an effort to express the feminine as both a social generality and a specific condition. Here unadorned bodies sit, stand and lounge apparently in a languid stasis uninterested and unaware of the viewer’s gaze. Xiang’s women then do not so much reveal specific women or describe a portraitist’s relationship with the sitter as they express a broader concern with the image of a women’s body under certain conditions. Yet, this description hardly exhausts precisely what it is that Xiang is doing.
Working outside many current trends in mainland-Chinese contemporary art Xiang Jing moves into a new stage of work. Now, these hairless, ‘natural’ bodies, itself a possible fetish in men’s erotic imaginary, come across as intensely introspective while also compelling our look with their almost magical skin surfaces and evocative facial expressions. This skin is not so much “real” as it is absolutely compelling in its delicacy, color, tone and translucency. It is as if one can look inside – as if we might be able to access something far beyond a portrait, beyond a mimetic figure meant to fool the viewer in its simulacra-like appearance.
If just the feet or hands are considered in detail, the quality of Xiang’s craftsmanship overwhelms. The poses and gestures in these appendages show not only a powerful understanding of how the body speaks (read ‘body language’) but also, more significantly, communicate an unfolding narrative we sense, but cannot quite access. Consider the hands in To Us…, a pair of figures standing one in front of the other, just barely touching. There is an incredibly delicate gesture where the right hand just grazes the hip of the other figure, creating a surprising tension between the two closed-eye women. Lost in thought, in themselves, there is palpable sense of desire and disconnectedness.
The eyes also expose a sense of soul-searching, longing, melancholic desire and distance – all simultaneously accumulating in the thin, smooth bodies. For example, in Peacock the oversized head and imploring eyes look right through us. The incredibly detailed eyes belie any sense of a body