Xiang Jing - Say It Loud
　　Xiang Jing is an unusually independently-minded young Chinese woman. Her personality is a blend of bohemian free spirit and down-to-earth common sense, underscored by a feisty mental attitude towards life and art. Life saw fit to place this personality in a delicate physical frame, and set behind a pair of large round eyes, the innocence of which belies this woman's talent for penetrating insight. Where, to date, Xiang Jing's art has focused on the female form, the woman's body has evolved as a conduit for her observations on the state of women in contemporary China: observations that, in early 2008, she decided to draw together in one exhibition, and to act as a denouement for this phase of her career. Having reached a certain maturity, Xiang Jing feels it is time to move onto something new.
　　But before that happens…the distinctive nature of Xiang Jing's 'portraits' of womanhood asks us to paint a similar portrait of herself against which to compare and contrast the work, and to affirm the truth of her vision. Xiang Jing's sculptures beg investigation: to be regarded closely, for their every expression demands attention, suggesting the need to be acknowledged entirely in terms of themselves by all viewers who encounter them. It is not a task to suit every taste. Xiang Jing's women are far from being iconic beauties, nor the voluptuous or lithe nymphs of conventional figurative sculpture. For a start they are perversely normal. They are also entirely unadorned, and laid bare, not just in their nakedness but from underneath the skin. The exterior posture has metaphoric resonance with the psychological states Xiang Jing seeks to express. As a result, these figures, either individually or in groups, are utterly arresting, taunting our penchant for morbid fascination with human flesh, the body, the sexual attributes of gender, and ultimately our awareness of mortality.
　　This emphasis on the everyday aspects of human presence in the work, on brutish realism in depicting the flesh and imperfections, is a fundamental concern of Xiang Jing's approach. How else to understand the outrageous in-your-face stances which these figures adopt, or the explicit exposure to which she subjects her female models. This choice represents the result of much thinking, sculptural practice, and questioning of the value of artistic expression, and of the contribution to figuration that Xiang Jing decided to summon from her own resources, and to which she could bend her skills. These latter strands of her approach are significant as they are conscious efforts: the work is not this way due to a straightforward facility with materials or form that is taken for granted. The choice is also informed by the fact of Xiang Jing being a woman herself—it is unlikely these pieces could have been conceived by a man. Although Mao told Chinese women that they held up half the sky, bestowing a constitutional equality upon them, the number of contemporary women artists in China remains proportionally few below that of any major art scene in the western world. It is, therefore, an issue. China's women artists have to fight harder to achieve real critical credibility. This is something Xiang Jing acknowledges, which makes it all the more frustrating when kind words are used to mask critical comment, in case the criticism proves upsetting to delicate female feelings. The truth might hurt, yes, but if you were to express distaste for Xiang Jing's approach, she would not cry about like a child. She would simply work out what she thinks, what she ought to learn from it, and plough this awareness into the next work by whatever means she deemed appropriate.
　　Beijing-born Xiang Jing entered the preparatory school of the capital's Central Academy of Fine Arts in the mid-1980s at a momentous period of Chinese history as the nation embarked upon the process of reform and opening. The preparatory school was located in the heart of Beijing, one street away from the China Art Gallery (renamed the National Art Museum of China in 2001). An adventurous and inquisitive individual, Xiang Jing was particularly affected by the new cultural ideas, and fragments of western ideology that being introduced to what had long been a closed society, and which were having a great impact on all students. Xiang Jing saw those exhibitions held in Beijing that would shape the future of art in China: the daring shows of nude studies of life models in 1987, and the 'China / Avant Garde' exhibition (Zhongguo Yishu Da Zhan) in February, 1989; a moment of heightened laxity that was one extreme against what was to follow with the State reprisals against the workers and students demonstrations in Tiananmen in June, 1989.
　　As a student, she had privileged access to the State museum, took full advantage of it. "I skipped class when I wasn't in a good mood, and would go to the museum and spend the whole day there looking at works." For Xiang Jing, Beijing was a "very special place". Much had to do with the vocations of her parents: their forward-thinking attitudes, and artistic and educated backgrounds—her father graduated from the Department of Chinese Literature in Xiamen University; her mother from the University of Wuhan where she majored in ??. In 1949, after the founding of New China, in order to restore the intellectual life of the capital, and to concentrate the elite of brilliant new graduates in Beijing, the best students were identified around the country and brought to the capital. Xiang Jing's parents were among them, which is how they met. This concentration of intellectuals in Beijing at that time helped lay the foundations of the city's cultural life. It took a long time to foment, and to achieve a degree of maturity, but for all those who grew up in Beijing from the 1980s, the nature of the environment, remained pernicious. It had particular emphasis in Xiang Jing's case in light of the work units and roles to which her parents were assigned. Her mother worked for the magazine People's Literature, where she carried the title of editor for twenty-one years. Her close acquaintance with writers such as Wang Meng (one-time minister of culture…), Han Shaogong (author of …), and others all wrote for People's Literature magazine, and were often guests at each other's homes. Xiang Jing recalls their ideas as being different to those with whom I normally came into contact. This experience was instructive.
　　Having completed her studies at the preparatory school, Xiang Jing studied sculpture at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. She worked in Beijing for several years before moving with her sculptor husband to Shanghai, where she continues to live and work today. The advance of her career has been slow, but steady, and not without it problems. Many of the issues she might name circulate around her constant questioning of what it is she wants to achieve. There was a point in her life in the early 2000s, where doubt almost pushed her to give up. Her work had reached its own conclusion in terms of scale, form and content. It was loosing its ability even to impress its creator, or inspire her to do more. But then, one day, after a period of frustrating experiment, which was felt to be taking Xiang Jing backwards and not where she wanted to go, she had an epiphany. This is embodied in the series of sculptures brought together for this exhibition, and which began with Your Body in 2003. This she describes as pushing her expression to a new level. Xiang Jing felt she had finally uncovered the language necessary for saying what she wanted to say.
　　It is worth noting that figurative sculpture, which is one of the oldest forms of human expression known to man, is today one of the most challenging areas in which to define an individual position. Almost everything thing imaginable with the human form has been done. Reinvention today largely relates to circumstantial allusions and situations that are often culturally specific. In all societies, as social taboos are refuted, or naturally become obsolete, the remaining layers of modesty and mystery are slowly stripped away; a fact that is in one sense responsible for the force of Xiang Jing's new works: a force that gains in power because as yet the taboos surrounding public nudity, even in sculptural art, are not entirely gone in China.
　　In these works Xiang Jing gives us nothing less than the female form shockingly laid bare. Their monumental quality reminds us of Henry Moore's mountainous, undulating female forms, yet these recent pieces are the antithesis of everything Moore anticipated of his work. One might lay responsibility at the feet of postmodernism which removed all final vestiges of the need for beauty in art, or of beauty as a core value of art. This arose out of a back to basics, or 'kitchen sink' sensibility which had faded in and out of sightlines through the twentieth century but was never far away. Especially in terms of the international thrust of pluralism that encouraged each and every artist at work in the global scene to work directly from their own experience and to bring art down to earth. Through a process of evolution, then, kitchen sink slid into heroin chic, and beyond; a trajectory which is pretty much mirrored in Xiang Jing's approach. Her emphasis not on the sickening anorexic forms of contemporary fashion idols, although we find allusions to that here too, but for the most part on the other extreme. Her women are ordinary, imperfect, awkward, self-conscious, resigned, and yet so defiant. A further clue to the transition maybe an analogy with that from awkward adolescence to frustrated womanhood: Xiang Jing began by depicting innocent adolescent girls, depicting them as innocent and vulnerable as she once felt herself to be. The early figures were as posed as a Degas ballerina, suggesting not a honed grace as much as an inherent stiffness of posture: a rigor mortis of a soul inherently delicate and unbearably vulnerable too. Today, she is clearly grown up; the work evidencing a change that is extreme, and not dissimilar to that which puberty can unleash on a body and mind. Like her sculptures, Xiang JIng is a girl who has grown up to become a woman, and who now presents a face to the world in which human expression is a reflection of so much external experience.
　　Today then in the works Xiang Jing has brought together for this exhibition, she offers a stark contrast to the sanitized images of perfectly sculpted women that the media bombards us with. But here, too, she asks an important question: what can figurative sculpture, the body of woman as art, offer today that is meaningful, thought-provoking, enduring? The antithesis of beauty they might well be, but in these profoundly shocking renditions of the female form she presents in her sculptures, just maybe Xiang Jing has found an answer.