Yin Xiuzhen

b. 1963, Beijing

Artist

Trained in academy painting at Capital Normal University (BFA, 1989), Yin Xiuzhen has produced installation and performance art since the mid 1990s. Her early works emphasized tensions between separation and connection. In her installation Door (1994), she placed outline sketches of a male and a female figure on either side of a common household door, and in her performance Woollen Sweaters (1995) she deconstructed clothing by unravelling and reknitting male and female sweaters.

Yin’s socially charged works in relation to the environment gained her an international audience. In 1996 she inaugurated a collaborative series, The Chinese and American Artists Group Project: Protectors of Water Source. The first work, an installation of polluted ice bricks from a river outside of Chengdu, contrasts sharply with the second, a performance washing clothes in pristine waters near Lhasa.

In the installation Ruined City (1996), Yin filled an exhibition hall with fragments and personal effects gathered around Beijing, covered with dry cement, evoking the dusty urban chaos of contemporary Beijing. Her installation, Transformation (1997), consists of rows of roof tiles filling a now-empty courtyard, to which she attached photos of the houses demolished for new development.

Further reading

Gao, Minglu (ed.) (1999). Inside Out: New Chinese Art. San Francisco and New York: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Asia Society Galleries, New York [for Woollen Sweaters].

Wu, Hung (2000). Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century. Chicago: Smart Museum of Art/University of Chicago Press [for Suitcase, Ruined City, Transformation].

Yin, Xiuzhen and Song, Dong (2002). Kuaizi/ Chopsticks. New York: Chambers Fine Art.

ROBIN VISSER