Yin Xiuzhen

Dusseldorf

Yin Xiuzhen, who is said to be one of China’s most important artists, currently holds his first major solo exhibition in Europe showing a comprehensive survey of her artistic oeuvre.

The exhibition begins with Yin’s early installations that are often presented in uninhabited, untouched landscapes and now exist in the shape of photographic documentations. The show focuses, however, on the expansive installations as well as the recent monumental, accessible, textile installations that represent a watershed in Yin’s oeuvre.

Despite their poetic formal vocabulary, her pieces can also be read as critical commentaries scrutinising the desires and fears of the individual in a global world that is oriented on mobility and efficiency. One speaks in the most populated country in the world of high-speed urbanisation. Yin not least references China’s significant role as a dominant textile producer for the world market and hence the associated working conditions in the textile industry when she reduces technological megalomania and its mass production to absurdity by means of individual manual labour in enormous textile installations.

Yin has produced large-scale sculptural and installative works since the late 1990s from old clothing, shoes, furniture and simple construction material like cement and stone, often in public spaces. A distinctive turning point in Yin’s work is evident after 2000: secondhand clothing has become a rich source of ideas and subsequent pieces that often revolve around state-of-the-art technology and urban growth. By selecting airplanes, automobiles and highways as the motifs for her large sculptures, the artist calls attention to the seeming limitlessness of mobility and the fast-moving pace of today’s globalised world. With their richness in detail and the revelation of the individual parts that are attached to each other, Yin’s works simultaneously reference artistic handicrafts themselves that require skill, patience and above all time.

Kunsthalle Düsseldorf

December 15, 2012 – March 10, 2013
Grabbeplatz 4
40213 Düsseldorf
Germany

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