Catalogue of solo exhibition by Xiang Jing at Tang Contemporary, Beijing in 2008. According to Karen Smith, Xiang Jing's sculptures of women are ordinary, imperfect, awkward, self-conscious, resigned and yet defiant. Through her work, the artist offers a stark contrast to the sanitized images of perfectly sculpted women that the media bombards us with. 'Xiang Jing began by depicting innocent adolescent girls, depicting them as innocent and vulnerable as the artist once felt herself to be. The early figures were as posed as a Degas ballerina, suggesting not a honed grace as much as an inherent stiffness of posture: a rigor mortis of a soul inherently delicate and unbearably vulnerable too. Today, she is clearly grown up; the work evidencing a change that is extreme, and not dissimilar to that which puberty can unleash on a body and mind. Like her sculptures, Xiang Jing is a girl who has grown up to become a woman, and who now presents a face to the world in which human expression is a reflection of so much external experience.' Artist biogrpahy is provided in the catalogue.