Yin Xiuzhen (b. 1963)
Yin Xiuzhen
Born in 1963
in Beijing, China, Yin Xiuzhen majored in oil painting at the Fine Arts Department
of Capital Normal University in 1989, and has since remained in Beijing, making
it her home and workplace. As a prolific avant-garde installation artist,
Yin began exhibiting in the late 1980s and has since created installations
both in galleries and outside in natural surroundings worldwide.
However, Yin was trained initially in painting, and did not move into installation
work until the mid 1990s, reflecting the experimental shift that evolved in
Chinese art at the time. During the initial stages of her installation work,
Yin responded to the particular makeup of her immediate Beijing environment.
With the quickly changing architectural and political landscape, Yin documented
both personal and community reactions to the constant interruptions in the
once familiar environment. Bringing together the conflicting feelings and
reactions to change in the landscape, her early installation work frequently
touched upon notions of “obsolescence and progress, history and change.”
(1)
Yin’s works are often participatory, with local people from the site
of installation donating some of their own materials, ideas, or stories. Collecting
used items such as fabrics, worn clothing, shoes and yarn from various peoples
in the various communities she works in, Yin recycles and reformulates these
objects into her pieces. Creating numerous installations in the Beijing environment
and in Beijing galleries, Yin has created works that have incorporated inhabitants’
shoes, tiles from destroyed homes that made way for high-rise buildings, and
water from a river polluted by the incursion of urbanization and modernization.
By washing blocks of frozen polluted water with clean water in her outdoor
project Washing the River (1985), Yin highlights the problems of China’s
sudden urbanization.
While Beijing has been the focus of inspiration for much of her work, documenting
the process of deconstruction and reconstruction, Yin has since installed
her work worldwide, examining cultural changes in different locales. Investigating
the repercussions of globalization, with the massive changes brought about
by mass transportation and communication, where physical distances have decreased
by massive leaps and bounds—she examines how the cultural fabric that
identifies individual cultures are either reinforced or broken down by change.
In addition to examining the effects of globalization, Yin also draws heavily
from her personal experiences. In her work, Portable Cities (2002-2004), Yin
recreates her personal images/memories of a city, and experiences of ‘living
out of a suitcase’, into miniaturized cities.
Taking found fabric and clothing from the city in question (i.e. Vancouver,
Berlin etc.), Yin sews together little buildings, bridges, and greenscapes
inside suitcases, manufacturing transportable cities. With landmark buildings
recreated on a miniaturized scale in the likes of gingham cloth, corduroy,
and cotton, and recorded soundscapes of the city in question, the pieces are
at once humorous, nostalgic and poignant. With their hand-crafted appeal and
use of old clothing, they infuse the anonymity of city-living with the personal.
While globalization and the increased openness of China has allowed the possibility
for more people like Yin to travel and visit all the cities within her suitcases,
ironically it has also meant that the cities themselves have incurred a certain
proclivity to becoming increasingly indistinguishable. Confronting the notions
of increased homogenization of cultures and environments, versus the conflicting
stratifications of wealth distribution and access to commodities and exchange,
Yin’s work brings about questions concerning the desire for rapid modernization
and globalization.
(1) Sydney Biennale Website