Xiang Jing

 

Xiang Jing was born in Beijing in 1968 and graduated from the faculty of sculpture, Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1995. She taught at the Sculpture Studio of the Fine Arts College, Shanghai Normal University from 1999 to 2007. Xiang now works and lives in Beijing.

Xiang’s artwork reveals a sense of insecurity through which the misty nature of the modern human character and life itself are accentuated and reified. Xiang Jing seeks after the existential truth of life through her continued investigation of “internality” of human nature in her work. Rather than viewing Xiang Jing as a “feminist” artist, she is perhaps more accurately described as an artist with a woman’s viewpoint and perspective.

Xiang Jing’s work practice is problem-oriented. Within the gradually marginalized realist sculpting language framework, Xiang Jing has made idiosyncratic and influential contemporary experiments. She shapes each of her sculptures into individual appearance and characters, hand-paints her sculptures in many layers, and chooses fiberglass as her principle material. These innovative efforts engender an impression of her work that is “representational and realist on the exterior, but highly contemplative and inquisitive in the complexity of humanity and the value of spiritual life in our contemporary age”. Xiang Jing and her work appear often in discourse on “contemporaneity vs. traditional medium”, “the female identity and the universal human nature”, “to observe and to be observed”, “internal desire”, “figurative art towards abstraction”, etc.

In five successive series Mirror Image (1999-2002), Keep in Silence (2003-2005), Naked Beyond Skin (2006-2008), Will Things Ever Get Better? (2009-2011), S (2012-2016), Xiang Jing continues working around identity issues, one’s interior psychological scene, the body, and the relationship between an individual and the exterior world at large. Some of her most significant works include Bang! (2002), Your Body (2005), The Open (2006), Are A Hundred Playing You? Or Only One? (2007), Mortals-Endless Tower (2011), Otherworld-Will Things Ever Get Better? (2011), Otherworld-The Silver Age (2011), The River Flows East (2014-2016), Anger in Motion (2013-2016), S (2013-2016).