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If electronic transmission of reserve material is used for purposes in excess of what constitutes “fair use”, that user may be liable for copyright infringement.VOLUME 12, NUMBER 2, March/April 2013 CONTENTS Editor’s Note Contributors Changing Faces of the Monster: Taipei Biennial 2012 Sylvie Lin Reactivation—The 9th Shanghai Biennale Barbara Pollack Shanghai/Taipei Afterthoughts Makiko Hara and Helga Pakasaar What Asia? Whose Art? A Reflection on Two Exhibitions at the Singapore Art Museum Chang Tan Yin Xiuxen: A Material World Stephanie Bailey WOMEN #17 Alpesh Kantilal Patel Go Figure! Contemporary Chinese Portraiture Inga Walton Poetically Perfromance Art Dwells: Poetry and Praxis in Southwest China Sophia Kidd Miao Xiaochun: Digitally Re-figured—The Animated Self Alice Schmatzberger Ming Fay: From Money Trees to Monkey Pots Jonathan Goodman Chinese Name Index Pace Beiji We thank JNBY Art Projects, Canadian Foundation of Asian Art, Chen Ping, Mr. and Mrs. ric Lt, and Stephanie Holmguist and ‘Mark Alison for thie generous contribution to the publication sand distribution of YshuStephanie Bailey Yin Xiuzhen: A Material World in Xiuzhen is an artist concerned with the story of people." Its a story she constructs from society itself using items—from bananas, shoes, and clothes set in concrete, to sculptures made of secondhand clothes—that recall personal and collective narratives. These narratives are rooted in the artist’s upbringing in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, and move into her experiences entering art school with little formal training, in 1985. That year, an exhibition at the Beijing National Gallery featuring work by Robert Rauschenberg confirmed for the artist— and many others—that there was more to art than Socialist Realist painting, a timely moment that coincided with the emergence of the avant-garde in China, later commemorated in the China/Avant-Garde Exhibition staged in February 1989. Yin Xiuzhen describes that exhibition as a summary of the °85 New Wave Movement which emerged in mainland China as a response to the rapid changes taking place in Chinese society in the early eighties and its opening up to the West. ‘The Tian’anmen Square crackdown also took place in 1989, before Yin Xiuzhen graduated with a painting project that used the idea of crossroads as a central idea, She remembers the period as one when students were spending more time outside of their studios, reluctant to return given everything that was happening on Beijing's streets. After graduating, she broke from painting altogether to explore alternative ways of making and engaging with art. Along with her contemporaries, during the 1980s and 90s she began to search for places to stage art projects in the suburbs and rural areas surrounding Beijing, a time when, unlike today, there was no support structure for contemporary art in China. Her work has since evolved with the social fluctuations of China’s economic boom, and today, she is a global artist whose work balances an innocent curiosity with a critical sophistication that has emerged from the experience of living through and witnessing an extraordinary historical transition. ‘The artist’s solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Diisseldorf, Germany (December 15, 2012—March 10, 2013), a collaboration betweemthe Kunsthalle Diisseldorf and the Groniger Museum in the Netherlands, was Yin Xiuzhen’s first major exposure to a European audience. In this exhibition, the artist's later sculptures were the focus, ones constructed for the most part from secondhand clothes as membranes for intricately constructed shapes sourced from urban life—bookshelves, airplanes, vans, and a series of miniature cities made from fabric that are presented in suitcases: works that consist of references that are at once familiar and accessible. 50Left and right:Vin Xiuzhen, Bookshelf No. 1, 2009, clothes, ‘wood, bookshelf, 226 cm x 126 em x 43 cm, ©Yin Xiuzhen, Courtesy of Pace Beijing. Left:Vin Xiuzhen, Nowhere to Land, 2012, used clothes, steel, stainless steel, mirror, vehicle light, 330 x 240 x 210 em. ©Yin Xiuzhen. Courtesy of Pace Beijing. Right:Yin Xiuzhen, Clothes Plane, 2001, steel frame, used clothes, photograph. ©Yin Xiuzhen. Courtesy of Pace Beijing. But there is also a sense of tension in the combination of something soft and personal—one’s clothes—and the easily recognizable, often industrial, forms with which they are combined. For example, in the large sculpture representing an airplane’s inverted landing gear, Nowhere to Land (2012), positioned at the Kunsthalles’s entrance, the tires of the airplane are made with large pieces of fabric that would never support the weight of any aircraft. Moreover, the subliminal sensation of the plane having been overturned makes the piece look as though it is a scattered remnant from a crash. Then there is Clothes Plane, installed in another gallery, commissioned by Siemens and developed as a three-month project in which company employees donated their work shirts to the artist. Coincidentally completed in August 2001, it was installed in a Siemens work office just one month before the 9/11 attack in New York, and when viewing the work today the association with 9/11 is difficult to ignore. The tension between the specific references of an artwork and how its initial ideas assume new meanings in accordance with the passing of time and the changes in history creates a paradox of universals; things represented as forms that are at once particular, replicable, and, by nature, a challenge to describe. The reference to an airplane, for example, in the sculptures Nowhere to Land and Clothes Plane, refers to a universally recognizable icon that represents a vast web of complex and interrelated historical associations. This situates Yin Xiuzhen's works not only within both national and international contexts, but in more subjective contexts, too, in that the use of something as familiar as a T-shirt could be read in an 51infinite number of ways when placed within a global context. This raises a plethora of meanings upon which multiple interpretations arising from the specificity of cultural and geographical circumstances might be inscribed— with some of them potentially diverging from the artist’s original intent. Nevertheless, in the immediate moment of communicative exchange when a viewer encounters an artwork, the immediacy and the impact of the work is inescapable. Whatever connotations a plane or a'T-shirt may have for one person, they are also related to a much larger constellation of meanings. When viewed from a Western perspective and in the context of this Diisseldorf show, the use of clothing in Yin Xiuzhen’s sculptures has been read, from the responses of those attending the exhibition at the Kunsthalle Diisseldorf, as a comment on China’s manufacturing industry that has been so central to the country’s economic boom. But on this point, she is quick to respond: Actually I never thought about making a comment on China’s manufacturing or textiles industry. It was not my intention at all, but a lot of people have mentioned this when discussing my work. ‘The presumption that a Chinese artist using clothes that essentially look the same as those worn by people around the world is a comment on manufacturing might be an easy one to make, and aside from Yin Xiuzhen’s denial of that, it raises questions within a Western context about whether or not this work is positing a critique of China. In this respect, the tensions that arise in the Diisseldorf exhibition from these questions are highlighted by the presentation of these particular sculptures to a foreign audience, which, for the most part, is as unfamiliar with Yin Xiuzhen’s work as the circumstances from which her practice evolved. ‘As such, this cultural displacement of Yin Xiuzhen’s was addressed on the day of the exhibition opening, when Artistic Director of the Kunsthalle Diisseldorf Gregor Jansen noted that many of the journalists who came to view Yin Xiuzhen’s show expected the artist to be critical of China, an expectation Jansen aspires to overcome, explaining: You cannot ignore China anymore and I think we have to learn to recognize and deal with this. For me, Yin Xiuzhen is an ideal artist to show because she is not dealing with clichés: She is not producing work on Tian’anmen or Mao Zedong, like the art we saw in the late 90s and the early noughties.? In other words, the exhibition does not only shed light on a major artistic practice within the Chinese avant-garde, but also dislodges Yin Xiuzhen’s work from the particularities of its roots within Chinese culture, while edging into a larger, more rapidly evolving critique by an artist who now operates within the art industry’s global networks. In the Portable Cities series (2000-12), fabric replicas of cities the artist has visited rise from within open suitcases and have been made of clothingYin Xiuzhen, Portable City: ‘New York, 2003, suitcases, used clothes, light, map, sound, 148 x 88 x 30 cm. ©Yin Xiuzhen. Courtesy of Pace Belling. sourced from people who live in those cities. The Portable Cities series was produced, according to Yin Xiuzhen, in response to the fact that in the past decade she has been able to travel more, an experience that parallels China’s tentative and gradual opening up to the world during the past thirty years. Constructed from fabric and stuffing, Yin Xiuzhen’s “cities” reflects a kind of curiosity; an exploration in which the artist attempts to understand, interact, or engage with a place on material and personal levels, with the suitcase a signifier of her mobility. In producing towers built from people’s garments such as characteristic Brooklynite plaid shirts in Portable City: New York (2003), for example, Yin Xiuzhen's toy-like “portraits” render the world’s cities—places that can be tough, alienating and impenetrable—into soft, more approachable spaces. Something Yin Xiuzhen’s seeks in her work is a kind of personal balance within the collective flows and forces of society as it undergoes the transformations brought on by technological progress and globalization. On globalization, Yin Xiuzhen notes: It brings a lot of negative aspects because no matter where you are, in New York or Beijing, everything is more or less the same. You have the same shops around you, so you sort of throw away your own identity. You gain something but you also lose something. In this reflection on progress, modernization, and development, the idea that we gain as much as we lose reinforces the idea of exchange that has been another underlying component of much of Yin Xiuzhen’s work. Here, the audience becomes as integral to the work as the artist, an approach rooted in earlier projects the artist produced in the late 1990s and presented in this exhibition by photographic documentation. Projects like Shoes With Butter evolved during a 1996 trip to Tibet, when the artist collected shoes from locals and filled them with yak butter in recognition of the butter’s role in Tibetan life both for physical and spiritual sustenance. In conceiving this piece, Yin Xiuzhen recalls expecting to find traditional shoes from the locals who donated their footwear for the project, and was surprised to find that the shoes looked much like those she would find in China. In these earlier projects, there is a sense of reciprocity in how the artist explores the way in which people partake in social events and spaces through interaction with each other. Shoes With Butter was left behind in situ, like many of Yin Xiuzhen’s other early works, not just because of a lack of space for storage, but also because, perhaps, these on-site installations were inessence offerings to the various cultures and landscapes that that served as the inspiration for the artist’s creative intentions. Such intentions are perhaps clearest in the seminal 1995 project Washing the River, staged in Chengdu. In this work, the artist transported water from the heavily polluted Funan river, had it frozen into blocks, and then returned these blocks to the riverbanks, the water’s original source, in order to “wash” them clean with drinking Washing River, 1995, photograph of water, with passersby welcome to join in the cleansing process. It is the one project Yin Xiuzhen personally recognizes as a performance, recalling the most rewarding part of the work being the communicative exchange that took place with those of the public who became involved. Washing the River is a subtly political work, reflecting wider artistic movements that were evolving in Chengdu at the time, and is predicated on 54Yin Xiuzhen, Collective Subconscious, 2007, minibus, stainless steel, used clothes, stools, audio, 1420 x 140 x 190 ‘om. ©Yin Xiuzhen. Courtesy of Beijing Commune, Baijing. practice rather than theory—a response to the immediacy of the present and the issues affecting specific communities. In the case of Chengdu, a response was activated on Yin Xiuzhen’s part by the detrimental effects of progress and industry and the artist did what she thought was right. In this reaction, Yin Xiuzhen’s works enter into a space of global concerns. She explains: Iwas born in China, raised and educated there, and I live there, so of course everything I do has to do with China. But on the other hand, in the past years, I have travelled and communicated with people outside. So in that way, I’ve become globalized and I can see that many of the world’s problems are the same. Environmental problems, climate change, these things are not only specific to China. Collective Subconscious (2007), a reference to the first widely available (and affordable) vehicle produced in China, the mianbao che (little loaf of bread van), is one work that strongly illustrates how Yin Xiuzhen mediates references between the particular and the global in her work. The sculpture references a symbol in China—the minivan—that, for a period of time, represented a sense of growing promise and prosperity in China through its opening up to the West that inevitably ended for many in certain individual and collective disappointments. In the sculpture, an actual vehicle has been cut in half, its framework extended and covered with over four hundred pieces of clothing arranged into strips that lengthen the central portion of the vehicle’s body accordion-like. A variety of stools have been placed inside the van’s enlarged interior, and a song is played on repeat: “Beijing, Beijing” by Wang Feng, a song with the following lyrics in its opening verse: When I walk on each of these streets, My heart never seems to be at peace Apart from roaring of the engines and sounds of the electric...On the work, Yin Xiuzhen explains: Chinese people understand the lyrics and know what it is about: struggles and disappointments. When they see the car they will remember that certain period of time in the nineties and think about where they see themselves now. In other words, the sculpture operates as a social space in which people can come together to collectively reflect upon their experience of society. The artist elaborates: This sort of social space; it’s like a little boat, and a lot of people are sitting inside, and they are all tender and warm together, but around them is this vast, stormy ocean. It’s a dangerous situation, and maybe the people want to go in one direction, but around them, things are up and down, up and down. In this once modest but potent cultural symbol from the recent past, Yin Xiuzhen explains how the exhaust pipe coming from the van’s motor is significant as a reference. It is an idea further expanded in Engine (2008), with its bright red clothing stitched like a membrane over an intricate heart-shaped structure presented on the floor. A valve ringed with metal protrudes from the sculptural organ like an exhaust pipe, alluding to the machinist qualities of the heart; the engine as both a mechanical and human form. The same sort of protrusion occurs in Thought (2009), a bright blue sculpture in the shape of a brain. The two sculptures suggest the idea of the heart and the brain as universal motors for thinking and feeling—the drivers of humanity’s needs and desires within the mechanics of society. The heart and mind: things that form such associations as those made by the little bread van: a collective subconscious. When speaking about the engine as a motif, Yin Xiuzhen explains: It’s also about questioning all of these things. Of course, a person can dream, but human beings can never have enough; they always want more and more. So the thing that drives these desires—the engine—can it actually endure this burden, or do we want too much? In this statement, the human drive to progress, accumulate, and evolve is explored through the individual, represented in the use of secondhand clothing, against the common motifs Yin Xiuzhen chooses to represent—an airplane, a minivan, or, in the case of Highway Yin Xiuzhen, Engine, 2008, stainless steel, steel, used clothes, 200 x 230 x 410 cm. © Yin Xiuzhen. Courtesy of Pace Beijing. Yin Xiuzhen, Highway, 2009, clothes, stainless steel, aluminum panel and lamp, 328 x 654 x 200 cm. ©Yin Xiuzhen. Courtesy of Pace Beijing.Yin Xiuzhen, Thought, 2009, 4 clothes and steel, 340 cm x 510 om x 370 em. ©Yin Xiuzhen. } Courtesy of Pace Beijing. Yin Xiuzhen, Thought (detail), , 2009, clothes and steel, 340 om x 610 cm x 370 cm. ©Yin Xiuzhen, Courtesy of Pace \ Beijing. , > > , > > , , , ’ , , , , (2009), a segment of highway complete with street lamps and road dividers. > Constructed essentially like a “road bed” in that it looks and feels like a > soft mattress covered over with black clothing, the work is a comment on the pace of progress and how the human soul cannot maintain the speed \ with which the engine of society moves. As Yin Xiuzhen explains, the work 5 invites “the viewer to lie down and to wait for their soul to catch up.” , 37Yin Xiuzhen, Dress Box, 1985, clothes, cement, an old home- made dress box, copper plete, television. ©Yin Xiuzhen. Courtesy of Pace Beijing. In Highway’s material references, the cement road is used as a symbol like the secondhand clothing, but in its opposite form. For the artist, cement is the material that constructs our collective physical landscape—roads, buildings, houses—and the clothes serve as a representation of the individual person. This reprise of the juxtaposition of something hard— concrete—with something soft—clothes—provides a visual language with which to think about the individual in society. But this time, as Yin Xiuzhen notes as she discusses the idea of social space from a global standpoint, it is like the whole world is still in that little boat navigating the vast stormy sea, struggling to survive against all odds. Highway recalls a key work not included in the exhibition: Dress Box, made in 1995 and the first piece the artist created using her own childhood clothing, which she placed in a wooden chest that was then set in concrete. For Yin Xiuzhen, the work is both a reflection on her own life and on China, a time when “everyone shared, more or less.” Dress Box is an individual biography embodied in society’s stories and histories. Yet, as tender or sentimental as this work as a memorial may be, it also touches on the entombment of memory—of childhood and nostalgia—in a material that essentially confines such memories in a hard casing, just as cities—and social systems—can confine the people who live in them, no matter which culture. In presenting common objects to an audience as an invitation to position oneself in relation to globalization’s symbols, viewers might also mediate the fact that while one has read an artwork in a certain way, the other might have read it entirely differently. Given the context of China’s transformation in the past half century and how it has influenced the artist’s work, the reception of it today expands on the function of Yin Xiuzhen’s practice, one that continues to invite a restorative sense a sense of “being together” or of repairing a collective consciousness that may have been fractured. Considering the pace with which globalization is progressing, their familiarity as objects raises the issue of what it means to experience the world today and the processes within which it operates, which is a global experience in and of itself. By employing objects and ideas that are both familiar and foreign, Yin Xiuzhen constructs an image of a material world made by material people: a narrative based on collective experiences built from individual lives. Notes 1 Yin Xiuzhen, in conversation with the author at the Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, December 14, 2012. All subsequent quotes are taken from this interview. 2 Gregor Jansen in conversation with the author at the Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, December 14,2012. All subsequent quotes are taken from this interview. 59