Xiang Jing

Xiang Jing’s eerily life-like sculptures confront the viewer with a duplicitous engagement with outward appearance and inner psychology. Xiang’s works range from the larger than life to miniature; cast in bronze or polyurethane, they draw from a classical tradition and aesthetic to portray the experiences of contemporary women. Her works depicting teenagers clubbing, shopping, and primping offer a veneer of generic beauty, sparsely accessorised with synthetic looking props and latest fashion trends; their appearance of mundane innocence is contradicted through their expressions of violence, depression, and malaise.

In Your Body, Xiang presents a gigantic nude. Fabricated from painted fibreglass, the figure is unnerving in detail, her expertly faux finished skin radiating a sickly, waxen pallor. Shorn headed, and slumped on a simple wooden chair, her subjective doll-like presence reflects the epitome of emotional depletion. Towering over the viewer as a goddess-like effigy, her vacant gaze projects downward with oppressive force: her nakedness and vulnerability evoking a self-contemplative reflection of inadequacy, humility and emptiness.