Yin Xiuzhen’s Fluid Sites of Participation: A Communal Space of Communication and Antagonism

Abstract

This essay considers a series of participatory works created by Yin Xiuzhen in which a typical Chinese domestic environment is re-created and restaged within an artistic context so that viewers can experience, albeit via heavily mediated means, an example of traditional form of communal life in China. Since the early 2000s, Yin Xiuzhen has travelled frequently around the world to exhibit her works in various institutions and events and, at times, make new pieces that were contextualized within those places. Her observations of life under radical social transformation in her home town, Beijing, have become a significant part of her investigations of transnational, transregional travel and exchange, which she communicates to viewers across geographical and cultural boundaries. By soliciting the viewer’s active, embodied engagement with her works exhibited in public galleries, Yin Xiuzhen not only recalls the community dwelling environment in a specific local area, but offers a fluid artistic site of provisional social cohesion, enabling intercultural, interpersonal connectedness as well as irreconcilable conflict and disagreement. This essay grounds a discussion of Yin Xiuzhen’s participatory pieces within the context of contemporary art and the exhibition-making market, which is characterized by an unprecedented interest in social participation and collaboration.