Naked Beyond Skin: Xiang Jing's Troubled Bodies

simpley being re-produced. As these figures are carefully sculpted and cast in fiberglass, the materials themselves begin to reveal the paradox in how Xiang works, and speaks. Initially, her figures appear caught – trapped in their own worlds, neither looking at us, nor each other directly. This introspection is empowered by her painstaking work methods that rely on a high level of craftsmanship and an instinctual approach to representations of women’s bodies. As the pieces are sculpted, cast, sanded, polished and painted, the figures begin to lose specificity while at once holding on to a real sense of personal narrative. This contrast is then available due, in large part, to her materials that allow a high level of reality while never quite being bound to it.

SKIN TIGHT
While the works might ‘fool’ the eye, might mislead the viewer into thinking there are actual people here, this visual clarity dissipates almost immediately as the viewer moves closer. There is no trickery here, at least not in the sense of real vs. fake, but there is a sense of that we cannot quite understand these women and their desires or needs. Where Xiang seeks the ‘truth’ we find only ambiguity and a wonderful open-endedness. It is as if the figures have been culled from hundreds of different impressions of women over an immense time – contemporary to be sure, but also transcending any sort of reference to an actual person, time or place. The skin of these figures, wrapped tightly around their frames, is tactile and lucid, possibly framing a powerful sense of a prototypical woman. This play between something most certainly of our time, and also entities lost in themselves, outside any temporal framework, provides a tension that is heartfelt, challenging and sensual. This balancing act, to essentialize without concretizing what a woman “is”, may lie at the foundation of why these women ‘feel’ the way they do when we see them. And, this becomes particularly problematic in the “new China” today.
Zhuang Jiayun, in a recent essay on the return of the term “Miss” in contemporary Chinese media, argues that the female body in the PRC has undergone a profound transformation, especially in the ways in which they are shown in the media, contrasted with