 he’s been called a gifted artist and master sculptor by Li Xianting--the father of Chinese contemporary art. Both Charles Saatchi and the Nasher Art Museum in North Carolina have collected her works.  Sculptor Xiang Jing feels confident that she’s reached creative climax: “I can hold my own in any international exhibition,”she says.
But the young artist was not always so self assured. Like the subjects of her sculptures she was fraught with insecurities. She was excluded from the art world and experienced both creative valleys and peaks. Yet throughout it all she’s always maintained a unique style and pure vision which was weathered the storms of the Chinese art world.
Little Woman
Xiang is a frank, sensitive artist. Her sculptures are not a facsimile of her subjects but rather a distillation of their traits. They bear an emotional truth and at the same time a kind of caricatured irony –perhaps the result of her childhood spent playing amongst the offspring of the Beijing intelligentsia. Xiang was born into an elite family: her mother was an editor of "People’s Literature", her father the director of a film studio. If she hadn’t become a sculptor she would have likely found herself behind an arts desk or in a film studio.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Xiang lived in a cultural workers residence in Beijing, in close proximity to many great cultural institutions, including the Musicians Association, the Writers Association and the Dancers Association. In fact, Xiang and her classmates were one of the first groups of youth to encounter Western avant-garde art and culture.
 The 13-year-old girl was accepted to her dream school – the prestigious Affiliated School of Central Academy of Fine Arts situated across from the National Art Museum of China and the nearby Beijing People’s Art Theatre. The young artists were allowed the privilege of visiting all the exhibitions and performances for free. As a feeder school for fine arts colleges, it provided a professional art curriculum including print, sculpture, oil painting and traditional Chinese painting in an environment which encouraged personal development.
Dancing Queen
In the 1980s when access to Western culture was limited, Xiang and her classmates were wearing jeans, listening to the Beatles and busting up the dance floor at all night school dances. “I was a super dancing queen,” Xiang says. “I liked disco. I was a girl who had too many pimples to count. But still I danced all night long till I wore out the treads of my shoes. Once I even had to go home in sock feet.”
When school let out for the summer she and her classmates went to the countryside to work the land with the peasants. It marked an end to the all night dance parties but she did go for lengthy rambles in the countryside: “Even now, I still love to wander . . . just like a wild dog,” recounts Xiang. Fascinating tales of her childhood can be found on her website, www.x--q.com, which includes her novel, "Take Me to A Vagrant Life," an emotional tale about a young girl written by Xiang during her youth. In it we can see many parallels to her life and to the lives of those in her "Little Women" series.
 Her free-wheeling days were over when she entered Central Academy of Fine Arts. Though prestigious, it offered a traditional education Xiang found immensely frustrating.“[She] is a natural passionate creator, but study does not bring her confidence,” says Qu Guangci who was at the time her classmate, then intellectual peer and who later became her husband.
Reform Era
In the 1990s the Central Academy of Fine Arts finally began to feel the impact of western contemporary art. It was a time when classically trained Chinese academic sculptors were abandoning traditional ideas in favor of more avant-garde approaches. While at school Xiang had a chance to experience this through sculpture exhibitions, namely those of Sui Jianguo and Zhan Wang. Before graduation, Xiang and her classmates held a show entitled "Three Guys in April."
The idea of holding the exhibition itself was controversial, because in a society which prizes longevity, undergraduates were not qualified to hold exhibitions. Her contribution was comprised of ten small sculptures of drunken languorous young ladies.
The first works were so popular with collectors that before the close of the exhibition her works were fetching up to 5,000 RMB, or about $600 apiece. At the time, an average salary in Beijing was no more than 1,000 RMB. Qu made a wise decision for her: he kept all the works and cast them in copper.
 But not everyone was a fan of her work. Prudish Beijing critics labeled her works “gray” and “unhealthy.” Xiang defends herself saying, “These girls are neither sad, nor happy. They are but absent-minded. These statues embody a true state of being.”
Living in Beijing, in the spinning nucleus of the Chinese contemporary art world, Xiang nonetheless maintained her own independent aesthetic standards. She says, “Art can be done in any way. There is no avant-garde or conventional. It’s what you want to express that is important.”
Thus, she continues to produce representational sculptures. Though her work is realistic, she not does use models or cameras to collect materials for her creations. “When a person has lived over twenty or thirty years, they can create from their or her personal experience,” she says.
Despite her success in the art market, Xiang soon tired of replicating these works. While Qu pursued his post-graduate studies, Xiang found a job as an art editor at "Popular Film," a notable pop culture magazine in China. But the foot-loose artist soon lost interest in creating her own work under the pressure of a 9 to 5 job. That year she produced a meager artistic output – only two sculptures.
The Great Escape
During the broiling summer after Qu earned his M.A., the two escaped from Beijing in a jeep to the quiet leafy campus of Shanghai Normal University. There the couple began their teaching life where Xiang was finally able to settle down. Teaching gave Xiang a regular life with generous summer and winter holidays, which allowed for more time in the studio.
 Ensconced in the walls of the campus Xiang had no interest in the “conceptual art” or "digital/electronic art" of the 1990s. When Qu visited Beijing, he reported that there were almost no artists like them working everyday. The couple was on the edge of Chinese contemporary art circle, working in their own realm. And for a very long time, their sculptures were either intentionally or involuntarily ignored by the mainstream Chinese contemporary art world. “We were seldom invited to weighty exhibitions. There was one year when we didn’t participate in one single exhibition,” Xiang recalls.
One day, by chance, Xiang began to experiment with color in her work and the result was a great success. From then on she began to make bigger sculptures with colorful dyes and turned from her former psychological narrative towards more realistic aesthetic.
In 1989, Xiang was invited to participate in the Second Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition in Shenzhen where she exhibited a group of works made from ready made objects. The works depicted scenes of everyday life: a crying baby, a girl putting on make up in front of a mirror and a woman doing exercises. The works were characterized by their use of life-sized proportions, emphasis on pattern and color and use of pop culture elements. Yet Xiang was still unsatisfied with her artistic progress, “In those works, I focused on plot and narrative and pursued dramatic aesthetics,” she says.
 Growing Up . . . and Up
But 2006 brought a change in Xiang’s work and also acceptance by the greater art community. She has left her maladjusted subjects behind and moved on to bigger and better things. Her solo exhibition entitled "Keeping Silent at China Art Seasons Gallery" marked an important milestone in her career. It included more than 10 sculptures including one work named “Your Body” which was so huge that some critics have called it a monument to the female body. The 3X6 meter work showed in 2006 at the Shanghai MoCA. “It is my largest work so far. If my studio were large enough, I would make a bigger one.”
Her latest solo exhibition marks a break from fashionable figures of the past. These new characters are blemished with scars and lacerated by time. Unlike her previous works, they eschew conventional ideas of female beauty. Curator Feng Boyi says it quite succinctly: “There is a persistent theme in her creation of growing up. It is not only in physical sense, but spiritual sense as well.”
translated by Wei Ying
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