Yin Xiuzhen is a highly acclaimed figure of the second wave in Chinese contemporary art. She is best known for her sculptures and installations that use everyday materials such as used clothing, porcelain, furniture, and concrete to evoke the accumulated histories of China's urban and social landscapes.
Read MoreBorn in 1963 in Beijing, Yin Xiuzhen grew up against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution. She entered Beijing Normal Academy in 1985, studying in the oil painting department. In the same year, the '85 Art New Wave Movement began in earnest, and Robert Rauschenberg's exhibition, ROCI CHINA, opened at the National Art Museum of China, encouraging Yin and her fellow students to experiment with unorthodox materials.
Feeling constrained by the visual language of painting, Yin began making installations and performance works that could better reflect the rapidly changing society she was witness to. For Dress Box (1995) the artist took her old clothing from childhood through to adulthood and cast it in cement. Signifying a bride's removal from her father's home to her husband's, the work acted as a vessel for the inaccessible past, enshrining the individual and collective memories embedded within objects.
Yin Xiuzhen later explored similar themes in her 'Suitcases' (2000–2002) and 'Portable Cities' (2001–ongoing) series. In the latter series, suitcases unfold to reveal miniature cities sewn together using clothing worn by that city's inhabitants. Her seminal work Ruined City (1996) is comprised of discarded furniture and tiles collected from demolished buildings.
Together, the materials of Ruined City conjure the latent memories of Beijing's waning communal lifestyle, which came to an end in the late 1990s with the rise of urban developments and the migration of impoverished communities to the city's periphery. Critical of the capitalist impulse towards modernisation, Yin covered the installation in cement, preserving the time-worn scene in what she called 'the raw material of this era.'
Yin is also notable for her early environmental interventions, such as Washing River (1995). Washing River saw the artist take ten cubic metres of highly polluted water from the Funan River in Chengdu, freeze it into blocks and ask passers-by to help clean the sediment from the ice. Underlying these works is the artist's distress at China's social and environmental degradation.
Of her work, Yin once commented, 'Amidst the great changes taking place in the external appearance of our lives, our memories are being slowly whittled away, as is our culture. ... We had no power to preserve these precious things and experiences, and so we could only use artistic methods to describe this sadness and indignation, to shout it out.'
Made in China 007: Action and Reflection, Yinchuan Museum of Contemporary Art (2018); Slow Release, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2016); Washing River, Tasmania Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart (2014); Yin Xiuzhen, Groninger Museum, Netherlands (2012); Projects 92: Yin Xiuzhen, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010); China in Four Seasons, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand (2010).
Yin Xiuzhen has participated in various significant exhibitions around the world including the 2008 Shanghai Biennale, the 52thVenice Biennale (2007), the 2004 Sydney Biennale, the 26th Sao Paolo Biennale in 2004, Inside Out: New Chinese Art (1998),organized by the Asia Society Galleries, New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California and Project 92 (2010) at the Museum of ModernArt, New York.
Her recent work Portable Cities series travel to a lot of venues, including Anna Schwartz Sydney Gallery, Hong Kong Art Center and Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand.
The artist has received a range of prestigious awards including the China Contemporary Art Award (CCAA) and the UNESCO/ASCHBERG award in 2000. Her work has also been acknowledged in The New York Times in 2006 and Art in America in 2003.
