Artist: Xiang Jing
Date: 2016
Size: 174 x 300 cm
Museum: Song Art Museum (Beijing, China)
Technique: Fiberglass
House of Motion, Anger in Motion, and Shifting Motion are three works belonging to Xiang Jing’s S series in which she tackles the formal rendering of “snakes.” The creation of this grouping took place over a longer span of time than any others in the series. After finishing the subseries Will Things Ever Get Better?—which came after the Strange Land series—Xiang Jing reflected that, metaphorically speaking, the animal forms in Strange Land were overly soft and tender—there wasn’t even one work depicting a raptor in this series. In the S series, this regret is manifest in the fierce and threatening shapes of these “snakes.”The physical language of Shifting Motion reprises the warm white tone of the works in Will Things Ever Get Better?: “Constantly changing and shifting shape, it represents the kinetic mutability of the body. Deep in thought, it is thoroughly at ease with itself.” However, one can tell from the respective completion dates of these pieces that Shifting Motion was the last piece to be finished, while the green-tinted House of Motion was the first of these “snake”-shaped works to be completed. The meaning of House of Motion is “the place where motion lives, the husk where the soul resides.”Metaphorically speaking, the entire body of a snake, from head to toe, is rich in meaning, and every movement it makes highlights its strength—it is the embodiment of movement. However, Xiang Jing’s metaphoric approach to snakes goes beyond this. The names and metaphoric implications of these three pieces do not have anything to do with the “Creation” archetypes of Western myths; rather, they quietly nudge the viewer to think of this passage from the seventh chapter of the Confucian Analects, “Shu Er,” which comments on engagement with and disengagement from public life:
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