Poetics and Politics of Body – About Xiang Jing’s Recent Works

lightness. On one hand it is because they are phenomenalized as scenes; on the other hand, it is because of the intended but restrained exaggeration. But the essential of the lightness is a passion which is not clearly shown, a delight which is comedy-like. The first person talking about this “lightness”, is Milan Kundera. In his words, the heaviness of the life is rooted in the oppression, the ideology that cramps us so tight, and the obsessive-compulsive-disorder-like resistance that belongs to the ideology. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, all the light moments and all that we treasure in our lives will show their unbearable heavy essence in an incredibly brief second. As for Xiang Jing, the heaviness mainly comes from the irrefutable hardness and realism of life. The world is the wall that compels us in the face. Life means not only durance, but also the hurt of the natural gifts. Thus Xiang Jiang uses the language of sculpture, the heaviest way of expression, to catch the lightness of daily life. Those momentary images are in some way meaningless and irrational. But they add up to a sociological report of portraits of contemporary lives. Those giggly, logy, idle or dandiacal images, those omnipresent crying women, smoking men, all these sculptures are as universal as the photos taken from those tiresome, boring soap operas.
She, he and they, are the unidentifiable “all”, “anyone” or “everyone”. There is a huge mass that is nameless. They are the healthy puppets; they are the lost properties which forget the owner; they are living with each other anonymously. Everyday they come and go in the street. The world looks busy and prosperous. Time is the melancholy container in which you can see every single figure with his fantasies and memories. But this is an incorrect dot in the painting, a scar in the rosy palm, a scotoma in the broken vitreous body.

2005 ——＞

Now, I hold myself in the arm.
This is the body.
From time to time, only the body is alive in the world

Since 2005, Xiang Jing has showed us with her new