The theme running through Xiang Jing’s 20+ years of creative work is the artist’s discussion of the current predicament of humanity and its possible way out. Four themed series made public previously include “Mirror Image” (1999-2002), “Keep in Silence” (2003-2005), “Naked Beyond Skin” (2006-2008) and “Will Things Ever Get Better?” (2009-2011), documenting the artist’s attempts to reveal the obscured humanity, from individual experiences of growing up, to broader discourses about the female gender, to human’s existence in the social structure, the works dig deep into discovering the course of evidence of life existence.

Growth in youth is Xiang Jing’s early theme; the “female body” was once considered Xiang Jing’s label as a medium of expression; and in “Will Things Ever Get Better?”, the artist gradually breaks away from the narrow scope of individual experiences through allegorical animal figures and acrobatic series of works, and demonstrates in space an openness, as well as ambitions and capabilities of maneuvering grand topics such as “the predicament of humanity and fate”.

The artist has pointed out how important viewing in person is to the self-examination of art, particularly in the context of the prevailing modern art “conceptualism and concept doctrine”, so with viewers standing in front of the works and experiencing their “live power”, it is precisely what Xiang Jing keeps stressing - the “perceptibility” of art, which is to say, without relying on excessive textual interpretation, art attempts to open up viewers’ long closed bodies so they can enter the psychological context constructed by the artist, and the “mirror” of art reflects exactly the inner beings of viewers, that is, the “truth beneath the skin”; at the same time, this approach aims to combat fragmentation, thinking that lack explorations of spiritual depth, and consumerism that occurs in an era of images.

The most anticipated piece in the upcoming exhibition is the artist’s new work “S” after a five-year hiatus. In “S”,