西岸 | BEST BUND

Xiang Jing is the first female artist to be given a large-scale solo exhibition at the Long Museum (West Bund). “Xiang Jing: Through No One’s Eyes But My Own,” a comprehensive retrospective spanning over twenty-one years of her artistic output, opens at the Long Museum in December, 2017. The 2017 exhibition program at the Long Museum will come to a perfect end with Xiang Jing’s exhibition. 

The artist’s five core thematic series—“Mirror Image” (1999-2002), “Keep in Silence” (2003-2005), “Naked Beyond Skin” (2006-2008), “Will Things Ever Get Better?” (2008-2011), and “S” (2012-2016)—along with a group of smaller, pedestal-mounted pieces collectively titled “I Have Seen Happiness” (2002-2010), were first shown together in Beijing in 2016. Now these pieces will be joined by others that have never been shown before, making this exhibition Xiang Jing’s largest one since her graduation from the Central Academy of Fine Art in 1995.

Long Museum (West Bund)’s lucidly articulated fair face architectural space is a challenging one to work with. How do we bring such a vast space into harmony with Xiang Jing’s artworks produced in more than two decades’ time? How can we be drawn in the enticed to view these artworks anew? For the first time, Long Museum will be consisting all three levels of its exhibition space, including level one, level two, and the stair-stepped main gallery, as well as altering the exhibition space entrance to construct a spiritual garden for the artist, who had been preparing for this for 21 years.

In the Long Museum exhibition, Xiang Jing renders the space itself a central topic. Periodicized contextualization of the artworks via documentation no longer constitutes the only way in for the viewer. The line of chronology broken, these works can be encountered in an entirely new space, and the subject of the gaze can be restored to each viewer, with the body of each viewer becoming the true measure of scale for artworks and gallery space. Xiang Jing believes that “viewing” is not only the physical viewing of the artworks, but also reflection and examination of one’s self. The artist hopes that these artworks will belong to the physical response of each viewer and to their enchantment with the experience of being in the physical presence of the objects. This is precisely what Xiang Jing has more than once described as the “sensory apprehension” of art, something that in a sense lies beyond textual explication and which demonstrates as well how crucial it is to see works in person when it comes to validating art. This moment reveals that the sphere of art lies inside the viewer—that the pain, anguish, and joy in our lives can only be envisaged through no one’s eyes but our own.

A 3600 square-meter exhibit space, a 21-year artistic journey, and more than 100 individual pieces, unmediated by technology, will open your body and allow the entry into it of art and a palpable unease and disruption.

With the opening of this exhibition, twenty-one years of Xiang Jing’s creative work is published in Xiang Jing: A Complete Collection. The three-volume catalogue, published by CITIC Press, includes a catalogue of Xiang Jing’s sculptures, a volume of essays and documentation, and a volume of annotations. A group of writers, including Fan Jingzhong, Dai Jinhua, Jonathan Feinberg, and Michael Kahn-Ackermann, have contributed essays and interviews composed or conducted specifically for this publication. 

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