{"id":302623,"date":"2026-02-17T14:18:10","date_gmt":"2026-02-17T14:18:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/302623\/"},"modified":"2026-02-17T14:18:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T14:18:10","slug":"for-chinese-sculpture-artist-yin-xiuzhen-old-clothes-carry-new-meaning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/302623\/","title":{"rendered":"For Chinese sculpture artist Yin Xiuzhen, old clothes carry new meaning"},"content":{"rendered":"

London, United Kingdom
\n \u00a0\u2014\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n On a rainy afternoon in London, Yin Xiuzhen sits under a canopy of red, pink, purple and orange garments stretched over a steel frame. From inside, the carpeted dome, complete with rugs and cushions, makes a vibrant sanctuary. From the outside, the structure, which stands next to a large mirror, resembles a human heart. Together, they form \u201cA Heart to Heart,\u201d an almost 25-foot-tall installation created specifically for the first major survey of the Chinese artist\u2019s work in the UK.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cI think it\u2019s very important for people to be able to sit down and talk through their hearts,\u201d Yin said, dressed in a matching brown shirt and trousers with floral embellishments, ahead of the show\u2019s opening. \u201cIn this era, communication between every individual is very important. As we all know, we are living in a chaotic, volatile world.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

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\n Named after the new work, the exhibition \u201cYin Xiuzhen: Heart to Heart,\u201d at London\u2019s Hayward Gallery, explores three decades of the artist\u2019s practice. It brings together several of her most significant and notably large projects, many of which have been shown at leading institutions including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Guggenheim in New York, as well as biennials and museum exhibitions across Europe, Asia and the US.\n <\/p>\n

\n Yin\u2019s ongoing international success is something of an anomaly. \u201cIf you look at Chinese contemporary art, all the big artists are mostly men, and a lot of them are painters,\u201d said Yung Ma, a senior curator at the gallery, who has known her for over 10 years. \u201cI don\u2019t think there are many female artists of her generation still working today, at least not on that level.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

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\n Born and raised in Beijing, and initially trained in oil painting, the artist has been constructing artworks from used clothes for more than three decades. The first came in 1995, when she created \u201cDress Box,\u201d an installation and video piece, for her first solo exhibition at a now-defunct contemporary art museum in the Chinese capital. In the work, Yin placed her own garments, collected over 30 years, into an old wooden trunk made by her father. She then filled the trunk with cement, \u201cencasing all these memories into one,\u201d as Hayward Gallery assistant curator Hannah Martin put it. A neatly folded pink shirt remains visible on top, guarding the stories hidden beneath.\n <\/p>\n

\n An accompanying photo series, \u201cMy Clothes,\u201d put the 32 items sealed within the trunk into perspective, offering context for each one\u2019s significance. When Yin was growing up, her mother worked in a garment factory, where she would buy offcuts to sew into fresh items designed by Yin herself. \u201cI always call clothes a second layer of skin,\u201d Yin said. \u201cClothes bear the inference of our cultural background.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n The artist has moved on from solely using her own clothes and now acquires garments in a multitude of ways. \u201cI collect different clothes from different groups of people to symbolize the collective consciousness of different groups,\u201d Yin said, noting how her formative years, which include coming of age amid the chaos of Mao Zedong\u2019s Cultural Revolution, exposed her to a staunch prioritization of joint, rather than individualistic, identity. In China, valuing \u201cthe individual over the collective was considered a shame,\u201d she explained.\n <\/p>\n

\"In<\/p>\n

\n Both Yin and the exhibition\u2019s curator point to her 2007 work \u201cCollective Subconscious (Blue),\u201d in which a type of minivan known as a \u201cmianbaoche\u201d (literally translating to \u201cbread van\u201d in Chinese due to its loaf-like appearance), is extended along the center using various items of clothing, creating a large-scale installation that viewers can sit inside.\n <\/p>\n

\n Introduced to the country in the 1980s, a time when few people had cars of their own, the minivan was an inexpensive option that allowed growing numbers of Chinese people to take to the roads. The vehicles were often used as taxis or for freelance businesses. \u201cIt was a symbol of progression,\u201d Ma said. \u201cHaving a vehicle like that was meant to embody some sort of entrepreneurial spirit and tied into the capitalist development of China.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n But Yin also remembers how Beijing became almost unrecognizable in the early- to mid-1990s. Cycling through the city to work as an art teacher, she recalled passing \u201cthrough countless hutongs (traditional alleyways) and old city streets.\u201d On her return, she said she would often discover that the buildings had disappeared. In her 1996 piece \u201cRuined City,\u201d she covered popular Chinese furniture and clay roof tiles in dry cement powder, evoking a demolition site.\n <\/p>\n

\"Yin<\/p>\n

\"Yin<\/p>\n

\n \u201cBy 1995 and 1996, with the real estate boom in full swing, entire swaths of hutongs and courtyard houses were being razed,\u201d she added. \u201cAt the time, many intellectuals, architects and artists called for a halt to the large-scale demolition and construction to protect the ancient capital, but their voices were too weak.\u201d The sense of hope offered by Yin\u2019s minivan serves as a stark contrast to the despair of those forced out of their homes echoing through \u201cRuined City.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Yin also looks beyond China for inspiration. The first installation that visitors to her London show encounter takes a broader look at the urban experience. Atop a reconstruction reminiscent of an airport conveyor belt, Yin\u2019s ongoing \u201cPortable Cities\u201d series recreates miniature cities in discarded suitcases made from items donated by residents of the location depicted. \u201cPortable City: London,\u201d for example, uses clothes collected from staff at the Southbank Centre, the arts complex that houses the Hayward Gallery. One member even stopped to point out a purple-patterned shirt they had contributed to the piece.\n <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n \u201cPeople in China didn\u2019t really start international travel until the \u201890s,\u201d Ma, the curator, said, highlighting that this was around the time Yin became a professional artist. Yin added: \u201cMy first international travel was to Japan, and later the Netherlands. I was at an airport terminal when I saw the conveyor belt, and this idea just came to me.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n The artwork adds a global perspective, but in \u201cA Heart To Heart,\u201d Yin is more concerned with matters closer to home \u2014 her audience\u2019s hearts and minds. The installation\u2019s heart-shaped form, and the act of talking inside it, are integral to her wider practice. In Chinese, \u201cxin,\u201d which is commonly translated to \u201cheart\u201d in English, can refer to the heart and mind in tandem. While Western thought often separates the two, in Chinese culture, emotion and reason are more deeply intertwined.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThe original Chinese title can be translated as \u2018talk through heart\u2019,\u201d Yin said. \u201cI envision it as not only talking through the heart, but talk and heart \u2014 the two acts embodied in the same installation.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cYin Xiuzhen: Heart to Heart\u201d is at the Hayward Gallery in London until May 3.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"London, United Kingdom \u00a0\u2014\u00a0 On a rainy afternoon in London, Yin Xiuzhen sits under a canopy of red,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":302624,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,308,93,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-302623","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302623\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/302624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}