Excerpt of the interview:
Xiang Jing: For me, there’s nothing that is purely objective in the world. Everyone is seeing the world from his own eyes. I am sitting in front of you, but what is the real “I”, neither you nor I will ever know. Even those who live with you day and night, your husband, your children, they are also the entirely independent individuals — so I often have this feeling of isolation and alienation. The only thing that I can control and be sure is what I see and myself. This is the feeling I especially want to express in my works! As visual arts, my concrete sculptures are in some way subjective representationalism. They are all my subjective pictures. For example, I would exaggerate the part of the head, like a picture by a child who will exaggerate the facial features, because these are the visual acquisitions. When talking to someone, you are used to looking at his eyes and his facial expressions. So usually I would enlarge this part a little bit, despite those rules and proportions, trying my best to show my sensibilities.
Lin Bai: I’ve seen many of your works, and what you do quite amazes me. Your mum said that you are a sculptor, so I think you must doing some installation art, of course I didn’t see your works at that time and didn’t know what they are like. But one day when I saw them, I was very much surprised. The feeling is so familiar to me, the strong feeling of women, and female life, very strong.
Xiang Jing: All my works are produced in the struggles of life. Since a young girl, I can’t accept two things. The first is — as I had written in a long assignment for the philosophy course in university — is the doubt of “to be alive”! I can’t understand why a person does not have the right to choose whether he will be born into the world or not. Everyone’s birth is very much a contingency.
Lin Bai: To be thrown into the world.
Xiang Jing: You don’t have the mere power to control it. And what’s more, almost everyone told you that you should not kill yourself, so you also lose the right to die.
Lin Bai: This is just what we called culture!