The sequence of Xiang Jing’s work seems to begin with the gaze of a young girl: isolated from or besieged by the adult world – perhaps entirely cut off – and resisting the clamor and encroachment of that world. She is a weak and tiny yet tough and tenacious fortress of the self. Somewhere among her smiles, grimaces, and defiance is an offensive and defensive war of which only she is aware. A sapling in thin soil only grows when and where no one is about tries, stretching its limbs and fluttering its leaves. And with the onset of adolescence, it grows restless, its sap begins to flow – like ice thawing in a marsh that’s now muddy and brimming with life; there’s desire, directed towards an object or no object at all, and then a sudden commotion, an unfamiliar body, a life or death feeling that borders on purgatory. When she’s smiling and happily idle, with the fragrant smoke of the cigarette between her fingers as a companion, she sinks ever deeper into herself in the face of mistrust between herself and the world. And there are more women to follow – their physical existence, pregnant or not, from youth to old age, is relied in Xiang Jing’s style which is characterized by indifference and delight, contentment and anxiety. Of course, in line with the conventions of figurative sculpture, this is Time embodied by Space, or perhaps transposed into the Time of Space; the difference lies in the fact that Time here is the time of a woman’s life, the time of language.
It seems to me that between Xiang Jing’s two important series, Keep in Silence and Naked Beyond Skin, there is a critical point of inflection and a crucial transgression. Whether in the flow of time in an exhibition hall, or between the blocks of time