Xiang Jing

Xiang Jing was born in Beijing in 1968. In the 1980s she was admitted to the Fine Arts School affiliated with the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), then went on to major in sculpture at CAFA itself, graduating from its Sculpture Department in 1995. Her graduating works won first prize in the CAFA Graduation Show of 1995 and received the Okamatsu Family Fund Award. Sources differ on whether this qualification is best described as a diploma or a master's degree; only one major biography (Ocula) specifies a master's degree, while her own studio and other institutional bios simply state that she graduated.

After graduating she taught sculpture at Shanghai Normal University; published biographies give differing date ranges for this period, roughly the late 1990s to the late 2000s. She moved back to her native Beijing around 2009 and, in 2007, co-founded X+Q Sculpture Studio with her husband, fellow sculptor Qu Guangci. She continues to live and work in Beijing.

Her sculptural practice, largely worked in fiberglass, has moved through a series of thematically linked bodies of work, including Mirror Image, Your Body, Naked Beyond Skin, and Will Things Ever Get Better?, generally centered on the female body, adolescence, and interior psychological states rather than idealized form. In December 2017, the Long Museum (West Bund) in Shanghai opened Through No One's Eyes But My Own, a comprehensive retrospective spanning more than two decades of her work; the museum describes her as the first female artist given a large-scale solo exhibition at that venue.

Xiang Jing is widely discussed as a leading figure in contemporary Chinese sculpture for using the female body to examine adolescence, self-image, and psychological interiority rather than conventional beauty or eroticism. The curator Zhu Zhu has described her work, in a comment reported by Ocula, as an attempt to move past pure materiality, in a manner comparable to a Buddhist pursuit of freedom from earthly possessions. Her exhibition trajectory, from early gallery shows in Shanghai and Beijing through the 2017 to 2018 Long Museum retrospective, is generally read as a steady institutional consolidation of a practice that began with closely observed figures of young women and expanded into larger, more abstracted meditations on the body and interior life.

Xiang Jing's institutional record, museum retrospectives, and collection placements at CAFA Art Museum, M+, the Long Museum, and other institutions, is well documented. Her public auction market is comparatively thin and harder to verify in detail. Artprice records more than 230 auction appearances concentrated in the sculpture category, and MutualArt lists roughly 100 works for sale or sold, but no source consulted identifies a specific top sale price, work, auction house, or date. Collectors should not treat any headline auction figure circulating online as a verified record until it can be tied to a named lot and a dated sale.

No current source clearly names a single gallery as her primary representative. Her exhibition history shows sustained collaboration with Lehmann Maupin (a 2015 solo show in Hong Kong) and Tang Contemporary Art (a 2008 touring solo exhibition and a group show scheduled for 2026), alongside a practice that appears to be managed largely through her own studio.

There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne for Xiang Jing, and verification of individual works currently depends on Xiang Jing Studio, exhibiting institutions, and gallery-level provenance rather than a published scholarly catalogue. Her museum presence, in China, Hong Kong, and the United States, is a stronger and more verifiable signal of long-term standing than her public auction history, where a specific, dated record sale has not been identified in available sources. Anyone transacting in her work should treat reported "record" figures from aggregated market databases with caution until they can be tied to a named work, auction house, and sale date, and should confirm current gallery or studio representation directly before a purchase.