ART CITIES:Moscow-Yin Xiuzhen
A leading figure in Chinese Contemporary art, Yin Xiuzhen began her career in the early ‘90s. Yin Xiuzhen uses her work to explore modern issues of globalization and homogenization. By utilizing recycled materials such as sculptural documents of memory, she seeks to personalize objects and allude to the lives of specific individuals, which are often neglected in the drive toward excessive urbanization, rapid modern development and the growing global economy.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Garage Museum Archive
After Ilya & Emilia Kabakov and Rashid Johnson, Yin Xiuzhen is the third artist invited to create a site-specific work for the Garage Atrium Commissions series. For her first solo presentation in Moscow, Yin Xiuzhen has produced one of the largest architectural structures she has ever made. Entitled “Slow Release”, the 12-meter long Installation is enveloped in more than 200² meters of red and white clothing, a part of which was donated by Muscovites and hand-sewn in the shape of a magnified medicine capsule. She also explained that old clothes, a material she has been working with for about 20 years, holds a special meaning for her. “My mother worked at a garment factory. I remember her bringing home pieces of cloth that she used to cut and patch our shoddy clothes. Our family was poor, and I used to wear clothes previously worn by my elder sister. And when those clothes got too small for me, mother would cut them and sew them anew so they would fit me. I don’t recall us ever throwing away clothes, but when I grew up, I saw how quickly people get rid of old clothes and buy new ones. They buy them, and if the clothes are not to their liking then they just throw them away and buy new ones. I was puzzled by this behavior. What drives people to act like that? Clothes are a person’s second skin! This is how I became fascinated with clothes and started using them in my work”. The red and white capsule references a new generation of pills designed to reduce the speed of release of medicine in the body in order to increase its therapeutic effect. “For me, the pill resembles a system of society, a complex relationship between people. Each pill consists of small granules, thus resembling a society that consists of people. A person can become a cure for society. In other words, we can change society for the better”. In Yin’s installation, however, the role of the decelerating element is played not by the capsule, but by the outside layer of clothing. By allowing visitors to enter the capsule, which is covered with clothes we wear every day, the artist creates a situation where people can slow down and experience the effect of being inside their own body.
Info: Curator: Snejana Krasteva, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 9/32 Krymsky Val, 119049, Moscow, Duration: 30/9/16-31/1/17, Days & Hours: Daily 11:00-22:00, http://garagemca.org
