The Art of Insecurity: Chinese Sculptor Xiang Jing
In “Your Body,” perhaps the best-known work by Xiang Jing, a gigantic nude slumps in her chair, eyes staring vacantly into the distance.
Yet the 45-year-old sculptor resists the idea that it, and her other depictions of women, are comments on the state of gender in her native China. “Those female figures are just carrying a message,” she says. “Their problems are problems we all have, men and women, Chinese or not. They are a body to carry thoughts.”
Born and raised in Beijing, Ms. Xiang grew up during the Cultural Revolution, and entered the Beijing Fine Art Academy in the mid-1980s, a time when, she says, the shift from collective to individual thought became her generation’s defining feature. She sprang to international prominence in 2007 with “Naked Beyond Skin,” a series of vulnerable, lifelike bronze or fiberglass sculptures of imperfectly shaped, melancholic women. She has in recent years shifted focus from the female form to the disconcertingly flexible acrobats in “Mortals” and docile creatures in “Otherworld.”
