“Will Things Ever Get Better?”, Today Art Museum, Beijing, 2011

Three years after the debut of Naked Beyond Skin, the exhibition that has received much attention, Xiang Jing themes her solo exhibition with a question, “will things ever get better?”. She presents her new set of works with an attitude best characterized as “question-asking”. Xiang Jing’s former methodological focus on the inner, internal, perspectival, personal world expressed solely through female figures (Naked Beyond Skin series), is replaced by something quite on the contrary - in Will Things Ever Get Better?, Xiang Jing aims to dissolve the perceived barrier between sociological studies and contemporary art, and presents artworks that are reflective, meaningful, and aesthetically profound, all through an art form that is structural and allusive in nature.

Will Things Ever Get Better? consists of two series of works, namely the Animal Series, and the Acrobat Series. They seek to explore our individual position in the game structure of the society, in which we face our “predicaments”, in the philosophical sense of the word. In the eight sets of works that make up the Acrobat Series, Xiang Jing extracts two acrobatic techniques, “body-lifting” and “contortion”, and fashions them in a hyperbolic form, hoping to highlight to the audience the “unhuman” aspect of the impossible postures. Gazing at and thinking with the six sets of works that make up the Animal Series, one would soon forget the specifics of one’s social circumstances, and begin to feel the essence of life. Animals bring not a tense observer/observed relationship, but a mode of existence that relies upon the co-dependence of different species which, taken separately, are independent as a species of its own. Objectively speaking, these animals appear realistic, but from another point of view, viewers coming in and out of the exhibition space become those which are quietly viewed by the animals - the table is turned; the stage is displaced and made fantastical.