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"Walking in the Invisible and Boundless Universe" Author: Xiang Jing et al. Guangxi Normal University Press
"Walking in the Invisible and Boundless Universe" Author: Xiang Jing et al. Guangxi Normal University Press
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Description
Introduction · · · · · ·
▶How to express women's life experience? Artist Xiang Jing and top scholars such as Dai Jinhua and Chen Jiaying had an in-depth conversation spanning nearly 20 years
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Editor's Recommendation:
1. The first interview collection of Xiang Jing, an outstanding contemporary female artist, telling her creative process and ideological trajectory over the past twenty years;
2. Top scholars in various fields, including Dai Jinhua, Chen Jiaying, Lin Bai, Zhu Zhu, and Ackerman, participated in the dialogue and contributed their insights on topics such as tradition, contemporary times, women, art, and social trends;
3. The documentary-style presentation and montage-style editing are both non-fictional on-site dialogues and fictional long conversations across time and space.
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Contents:
Is the person entrusted with the mission of Chinese civilization a woman? Is there a kind of feminist creation? Is contemporary art just a word game in a small circle? Can artificial intelligence create works of art that can only be perceived but not described? As an iconic female artist in contemporary China, why did Xiang Jing completely end her sculpture creation in 2019?
Over the past 20 years, artist Xiang Jing has had a series of conversations with friends from different fields, including writer Lin Bai, philosopher Chen Jiaying, film scholar Dai Jinhua, and poet Zhu Zhu. These conversations involved the growth and creation of artists, as well as issues such as feminism, traditional culture, contemporary art, and social trends. We disrupted the chronological order of these conversations and edited together clips of the same topic at different times in a montage manner to form a long conversation.
German scholar Ackerman mentioned in a conversation with Xiang Jing that in the process of creation, artists are like walking in an invisible and boundless universe. The long conversation after the disruption of time and space simulates a similar universe in a sense. External factors such as time and space are stripped away. Through the changing and unchanged expressions in the conversation, the artist's basic reliance and boundaries in this universe are vaguely visible.
About the Author
Xiang Jing was born in Beijing in 1968 and graduated from the Sculpture Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1995. He currently works and lives in Beijing.
Rather than saying that Xiang Jing is a "feminist" artist, it is better to say that she is an artist with a female perspective and female consciousness, but this is not the point. The sense of uneasiness revealed in her works is the fog of human nature under modernity and the constant confirmation of survival itself - "inner nature" is the truth of survival that she attempts to explore. When talking about academic propositions such as "contemporaneity and traditional media", "female identity and universal human nature", "watching and being watched", and "inner desire", Xiang Jing and her works are an unavoidable case.
In the five phases of his solo exhibition series, “Mirror Image” (1999-2002), “Keep Silent” (2003-2005), “Full Naked” (2006-2008), “Will This World Be Better?” (2009-2011), and “S” (2012-2016), Xiang Jing has been thinking about the clues of identity, psychological situation, and body. Some important personal works include “Bang!” (2002), “Your Body” (2005), “Opener” (2006), and “One Hundred People Playing You? Or One Person?” (2007), “Mortals—Infinite Columns” (2011), “Other Lands—Will This World Be Better?” (2011), “Other Lands—Silver Age” (2011), “A River Flows Eastward” (2014-2016), “Walking Anger” (2013-2016), and “S” (2013-2016).
Other interlocutors (in order of appearance in the book):
Lin Bai, formerly known as Lin Baiwei, is a contemporary writer. She started writing poetry at the age of 19 and later focused on novel writing. In 1994, she published the novel One Man's War. She is considered one of the representatives of "personalized writing" and "female writing".
Chen Jiaying is a professor at the Department of Philosophy at Capital Normal University. His research areas are modern Western philosophy, including phenomenology (especially Heidegger's philosophy), analytical philosophy (especially Wittgenstein's philosophy), science and philosophy, ethics and moral philosophy, etc.
Karen Smith is a British art critic and curator. Her main research area is Chinese contemporary art after 1979. She has written articles for many publications and exhibition special issues, and has also written several books on the current situation and history of Chinese contemporary art.
Zhu Zhu, a poet, art curator, and art critic, has written many collections of poetry, prose, and art reviews.
Dai Jinhua is currently a professor and doctoral supervisor at the Institute of Comparative Literature, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Peking University, and director of the Center for Film and Cultural Studies, Peking University. She is engaged in research on mass media, film and gender, and has written more than ten academic monographs.
