Anger in Motion

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: "When called to office, to undertake its duties; when not so called, to lie retired” (translated by James Legge). When an emperor was a man of virtue, that was sufficient condition for a gentleman to serve him; but at other times the circumstances were less propitious. Thus, when a gentleman was needed by his ruler, he would serve; and when he wasn’t called to serve, he would withdraw. Not only is this consistent with Confucian philosophical notions of self-preservation, it does not conflict with Daoist ideas about adhering to the laws of Nature.

This complex rhetorical metaphor is visualized in an even more concise, direct, and uncomplicated manner in both Anger in Motion and Shifting Motion. The figure in Anger in Motion is an angry red python, born with a human mouth and human teeth. It exudes brutal power and dynamic fury. Raising its head, it fixes the viewer with enraged eyes; it never rests; its power is manifest. Shifting Motion uses the formless and invisible transformations of the Book of Changes to dispel all of the dangerous “power” accumulated inside the snake of Anger in Motion. It uses a finite shape to display infinite perceptions: for the greatest truths are the simplest, and formlessness is contained within form. In sum, if House of Motion represents the typical face of the life force, then Anger in Motion and Shifting Motion crystalize the two extreme states of that life force: violence and quietude. And yet, as it is written in the Daodejing, “It is better to leave a vessel unfilled, than to attempt to carry it when it is full.” Or perhaps Shifting Motion is simply the “Form of the Formless, and the Semblance of the Invisible.” Only in this way can it possess the strength to “defeat the powerful with gentleness.” This is Xiang Jing’s method: to take a form and cut it into segments, thereby completing “the story behind the scenes.”