Following Yin Xiuzhen’s first solo exhibition Second Skin in 2010, Pace Beijing presents a second solo exhibition this July for the artist. As a leading Chinese Contemporary artist, Yin has the ability to imaginatively integrate collective memories and places, drastic changes and rough realities with some of her intimacy personal items; revealing the reality of Chinese Postmodernism – its impermanence quality shadowed upon its uncontrollable development. Such quality was also brought out in two of the artist’s new works Nowhere to Land (2012) and Firework (2013) featured in this exhibition – the wheels that idle in midair, and the disorderly falling of the once dazzling fireworks.
Traits of the artist’s modest, nostalgic and feminine vulnerable character are evident in her works, combined with collective memories and fragments; the artist’s concerns for the future are subtly but effectively conveyed through her works. Yin’s works not only reflect the accelerated historicity of our daily experience, they also represent the artist’s individual significance and independence. Furthermore, through her works, Yin transcends individual elements and strives to establish some kind of personal values in the public realm. According to Homo K. Bhabha, this is known as Thirdness, a key element and a conceptually new international culture based on hybridity, a space that collapses alternative cultural practices and historical narratives.
Yin’s performance art Washing Water (1995) which implemented two days is one that caught most public attention. The artist handed out cleaning brushes, buckets and clean water to passers‐by; cleaned water was then injected back into the polluted river in an attempt to clean 10 cubic meters of polluted water from a river nearby. In her other project Beijing (1999), the artist’s project for the Third Asia‐Pacific Treiennal, 200 unsettling photos displaying environmental damages during a renovation were mounted on tiles, and then constructed onto a traditional Beijing style roof‐like structure. The art piece brought upon some huge impact on its audiences, forcing them to a close encounter to the unbalanced and destructive impact caused to their environment in the name of development. For her Portable City Series (2001‐), Yin collected worn clothes from different cities and used them to create miniature models of either the local architecture or suitcases, signifying globalization. In an installation work, Collective Unconsciousness (2007), over 400 pieces of clothes were collected from individuals to extend the vehicle, which is an emblem of the early phase of economic reform; turning the little private van into a very long public bus to signify collective idealism and compressed reality. The piece was exhibited at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2010. A used shipping container has been transformed into a signature round cut diamond in Yin Xiuzhen’s piece Black Hole (2010), suggestive of our unlimited wants and desire to consume.
This exhibition at Pace Beijing will be yet another major solo exhibition for the artist, following the first two stops of her solo retrospective tour exhibition in Europe, at Groninger Museum and Dusseldorf Art Museum. The artist will be having a fruitful year ahead of her. Besides the exhibition at Pace Beijing, an exhibition named Black Hole organized by the Taiwan Fubon Foundation will be held during the same period. The artist will also be submitting her work Book Rack to the Moscow Biennale, and her works Collective Unconsciousness and the Portable City Series will be exhibited in the Seoul National Gallery in November.
Opening reception on July 20th 2013, 4-6pm
Image: © Yin Xiuzhen, PACE Gallery
