Yin Xiuzhen

Once she began to travel abroad frequently for her work, Yin came to be identified with the material that best expresses her abiding sense of dislocation: old clothes repurposed for art. Her two best-known series, "Suitcases" (2000-02) and its spin-off "Portable Cities" (2001-present), comprise suitcases containing miniature cities made from clothes previously worn by each locale's citizens. When closed, the works look like ordinary suitcases. When opened on the floor (Yin's prescribed mode of display), they reveal pop-up cityscapes, resilient aide-mémoire sometimes accompanied by sounds recorded in the cities' public places. Evoking artists as disparate as Duchamp, Boltanski and LeDray, the two series contain many examples keyed to Yin's own travels, including Shanghai (2002), San Francisco (2003), Vancouver (2003) and Berlin (2006).

Yin frequently makes a direct link between personal displacement and larger social dynamics. Building Game (2000)-first shown in "Unusual & Usual," one of the now legendary independent shows surrounding the Shanghai Biennale that year [see A.i.A., July '01]-offers an entire complex of vertical architectural structures, many above human height, made of sewn-together clothes stretched over wooden frames erected on the floor and lit from within. The installation's mushrooms-after-a-rain quality evokes the surreal feeling of China's startling building boom.

In 2001, the German conglomerate Siemens commissioned Yin to create a large-scale sculpture of an airplane made from the clothing of their employees. This work was completed on Aug. 10, 2001, and hung from the ceiling of a Siemens office in Beijing. Just one month later, the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York shocked the world and shattered many people's sense of security. Yin was very touched by the commemorative effect that Clothes Plane now had for the Siemens employees. Thereafter, she began to make more planes, and the resulting "International Flight" (2002-present) became an ongoing project, prompting viewers in many different locales to consider both the pleasures and anxieties of air travel today.

A similar ambivalence is implicit in Weapons (2003), composed of long horizontally hung poles that, lancelike, appear to have skewered various globes and disks. The assemblages, wrapped in bright cloth, evoke broadcast towers turned not only mentally but physically intrusive. The heavens, too, seem vulnerable to mass-media penetration by TVT-Rocket (2005), a frame-and-fabric piece that stretches dozens of feet into the air in three freestanding variations of Shanghai's futuristic, tripod-based Oriental Pearl Tower broadcast facility-with cloth booster rockets attached.

Since completing the Collective Subconscious minibus, Yin has made a number of works that express her ever-growing regard for communality. In 2008, she hired unemployed workers from the city of Chemnitz, in the former East Germany, to join her in creating a large performative installation tellingly titled Commune. The workers took clothes donated by visitors and sewed them together into one large multicolored circular curtain. The cloth was then suspended around a work station at the city's Public Management Center, creating a productive space that people share both physically and in spirit. Yin's inspiration came from childhood memories of her visits to the clothing factory where her mother worked. There she first grasped a communal sense of large-scale industrial work, still one of the major social organisms of Chinese society. Likewise, her roughly 50-foot-long Flying Machine (2008), shown at the Shanghai Biennale in 2008, invited visitors to participate in China's journey toward modernization by clambering about in an installation that merged a tractor, a Volkswagen sedan and a passenger jet.

Recently, as evidenced by the works in the "Second Skin" show at Pace Beijing, Yin has taken a new turn in her exploration of the boundaries between internal and external, individual and collective. Skin Cube (2009), a roughly 6½-foot-wide block of "human skin" made from undergarments and punctuated by viewing portals, presents a detailed cross section of layers complete with hair follicles. Introspective Cavity (2008), using material normally worn outside of the body to construct a version of an organ from inside the body, is, in effect, a giant womb. After entering the nearly 50-foot-long expanse, one can recline on the padded floor and, bathed in the pink light filtering through the fabric, meditate while lulled by an ambient soundtrack of gently running water.

But the piece that attracted the greatest audience participation at Pace was Thought (2009), a massive, blue-fabric brain that visitors crawl into, metaphorically entering what is arguably the most intimate space of another person-his or her mind. Once inside the 16¾-foot-high chamber, viewers were awash in gentle shades of blue, a hue chosen for its links with restfulness and inner peace.

Whatever the results of Yin's long search for communality, one thing is certain. Throughout her career, she
has been able to draw inspiration from mundane objects and to express concepts that deeply connect to Chinese tradition but also respond to profound changes in social reality.

1 All statements attributed to Yin Xiuzhen are from her conversations with the author in Beijing, March-April 2010.

“Yin Xiuzhen: Works, 1994-2008” was on view at Chambers Fine Art, New York, Feb. 2-Mar. 20.
“Projects 92: Yin Xiuzhen” appeared at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mar. 14-May 31. “Yin Xiuzhen: Second Skin” was shown at Pace Beijing, Mar. 18-May 8, 2010.

Currently On View “China in Four Seasons: Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen,” at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand, through Sept. 12. Works by Yin in the group exhibitions “Larger Than Life—Stranger Than Fiction,” Fellbach, Germany, through Oct. 11, and “Popping Up: Revisiting the Relationship Between 2 Dimensions and 3 Dimensions,” Hong Kong Arts Centre, Sept. 18-Oct. 22.

PAN QING is a curator for international exhibitions at the National Museum of China, Beijing.