'Embrace Jabba' Size: 225 x 165 x 115cm
Medium: Hand painted fibre glass
Edition: 20 + 4 AP
Amor vincit omnia [Latin: 'Love conquers all'] was the motto inscribed on the brooch worn by Madame Eglantyne, Chaucer's Prioress in The Canterbury Tales. In accordance with this adage, Xiang Jing brooks no coyness when it comes to translating the all-consuming force of female sensuality into visual, tactile expression in this piece that seizes you in the manner of a voracious anaconda. Xiang Jing, herself no shrinking violet, doesn't flinch when it comes to importing an element of the grotesque to buttress her argument: Willingly yield to my embrace or pay a price beyond your powers of imagining! This piece exerts a captivating force as powerful as Jabba the Hutt holding Han Solo hostage in Return of the Jedi. Yet with confounding contrariness, this opus also suggests an endearingly wistful, girlish tenderness:
Behind heavy curtains hanging in Mo Chou's room,
She woke from deep slumber into unending gloom.
Divine Lady met the King of Chu in a dream,
But in this maid's bower there's no love it would seem.
Wind gust knows not the water caltrop is tender,
Who taught cassia shoots in moondew such sweet incense?
Even if brooding on the beloved one makes no sense,
Love still makes you sadly and madly surrender.
Untitled II, Li Shangyin
Embrace Jabba tingles with the incandescent, static-electric passivity of Yin waiting for the Yang force to come unwittingly along and strike the spark that sets off the engulfing conflagration in which all must find their salvation or utterly perish. The craven of heart must thus beware this chair, for it forms the seat of no mere ephemeral dalliance, demanding rather a fusion of bodies, and of souls, indivisible even after the bonds of base matter dissolve. Xiang Jing's vision transcends the tawdry, transient attachments that all too often characterise modern amorous affairs in these latter days, and voices an aching yearning for the Then when 'till death do us part' was more than just an empty liturgical formula.
With a passion born of her deep-seated conviction, Xiang Jing's eyes and hands unerringly isolate and chisel away the superfluous to unveil the voluptuous contours of woman's eroticism and thus lay bare the question that the female of the species poses to the male with taunting, mocking, challenging eyes, 'Are you man enough to sit in my lap and be devoured by my love?' So do not dare to sit, if you care not to commit, for from this work of art, you may never part. May the force be with you!
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