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Zhu Zhu, Tr. Denis Mair

You Can Only Rise So High
At a slower pace than was her wont, Xiang Jing spent five years putting together this exhibition. It would be no exaggeration to say that she has been on a hiatus. Since mounting “Will Things Ever Get Better?” (2011, Beijing Today Museum), she has gained depth in terms of self-doubt and medium-related anxiety.
Xiang Jing's understanding of the sculptural medium was formed by representational approaches within modernism. At the same time, fondness for literature and film has given her a fascination with narrative content. In the context of current sculpture, her reference points can be found in hyperrealist works by Ron Mieck and Tony Cragg. Yet ours is an era in which conceptual treatments such as Anish Kapoor's have taken over the mainstream: in China most of the young generation have followed his lead while emphasizing relatedness of their creations to architecture, space and setting. Whether in terms of language or concepts, to apply colors by hand on representational figures is starting to seem backward, and this shift in preferences has also affected Xiang Jing. She once stated her intention to hold an exhibition dealing with the termination of sculpture. Of course, she is neither such a great figure that sculpture will be terminated at her hands, nor is she so negligible that sculpture will end up terminating her.
For a long time Xiang Jing's creative fulcrum was to adopt a view of the female body that penetrated to “the truth beneath the skin” and exposed hidden obscurities of human nature. Yet she longed to make an end of such unidirectionality, to get past the curse of sexuality so as to embark on more sociological narrative strategies. . In “Will Things Ever Get Better?” she deprived herself of her previous fulcrum—her “most powerful source of support”—by laying out  tableaux of acrobatic performers in a theatrical space, hoping that viewers would be prompted to ponder their collective predicament. However, the results were open to dispute.[1] Having taken this step, she was faced with a dilemma: 1) either resume her familiar groove by reopening the space of sculptural language 2) or give up the sculptural medium that to her seemed “too slow”...“too static” in favor of photography, film-making or even writing.
The answer emerges in this exhibition. As suggested