Trained in the rigours of Soviet-style socialist realism in Beijing, Yin Xiuzhen belongs to a generation of Chinese artists whose horizons were dramatically widened by the arrival of contemporary Western art — above all Robert Rauschenberg’s landmark 1985 exhibition in Beijing, which helped shift her from painting towards a broader, more experimental practice. Yin Xiuzhen: Heart to Heart, a solo retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery, traces that transformation through works that move from memory and demolition to travel, clothing and urban change, culminating in an immersive new installation that offers a vivid snapshot of the artist’s deeply personal yet global vision.
by Aleksandra Todorovic
If you approach Hayward Gallery from Waterloo Bridge, you will be treated to London’s skyline at its best. In the immediate surroundings, you will be nestled among the majestic Brutalism of Southbank Centre. Look east, and you will see such iconic buildings as St Paul’s Cathedral, Tower Bridge and The Shard; looking west, the panorama features the London Eye, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. Once you step through the door of the Hayward Gallery, you will be greeted by a miniature version of all of these buildings, woven out of fabrics in myriad colours and patterns. Portable City: London is the most recent in Xiuzhen’s series of 46 miniature cities presented in suitcases, each commemorating a place the artist has visited, capturing an impression, a memory of a journey sewn out of second-hand clothes collected from local inhabitants. In this latest iteration of the subject, the used garments were donated entirely by the Southbank Centre’s staff.
Seven other Portable Cities, including New York, Hamburg, Melbourne and Seoul, are arranged along a motionless luggage carousel, the impression of an airport complete with an airplane suspended from the ceiling, also made out of textile. As a Chinese artist born in 1963 and growing up during the Cultural Revolution, it wasn’t until she was in her 30s in the 1990s that Xiuzhen had the opportunity to travel abroad, to participate in international exhibitions and artist residences. Suddenly spending much time at airports, the artist started thinking about the implications of travel and, wishing to preserve her memory of places she had stayed in, she started this ever-growing series of works. In her fascination with textile, Xiuzhen’s art shares an affinity with her British contemporaries Tracey Emin (b. 1963) and Sarah Lucas (b. 1962), using this traditionally ‘female’ material to break artistic and societal boundaries with their intimate and intricately crafted objects. Working alone, without the help of studio assistants, Xiuzhen creates cityscapes of great beauty with painstaking dedication and detail. So much so that Portable City: London nearly missed being ready for the opening of the exhibition, according to a curatorial tour I stumbled upon during my visit.
For all her international travel, Xiuzhen’s art is deeply rooted in her native Beijing. Fascinated by the whirlwind changes her city has witnessed over decades, in many of the works on display the artist zooms into a particular detail in order to expose and document the architectural, environmental and socio-economic impact of rapid urbanisation. In Ruined City (1996), pieces of old fashioned Chinese furniture and roof tiles are coated in dry cement powder, Xiuzhen remembers how the smell of this material used to fill the air. She recalls days when she would see buildings on her way to work, only for them to be gone by the time she was going back, and this rapid demolition of the old and construction of the new is powerfully evoked in Ruined City, the abandoned pieces of furniture a stark reminder that this was not just a sign of modernisation in Beijing’s architecture, but also the end of an era in people’s way of living, their intimate daily routines and a sense of community.
This is all beautifully brought to life in the highly evocative work Beijing Opera (2001), a room filled floor to ceiling with Xiuzhen’s photographs of the Houhai neighbourhood, where an older generation of people passed their time outdoors. We are invited to walk around, or sit on miniature stools among the life-sized figures, mostly men, and for a moment immerse ourselves in a simpler, unhurried way of life and indulge in a similar sense of nostalgia that connects Xiuzhen’s compatriots with her Western audiences.
The interplay between personal and public domains is perhaps best represented by Collective Subconscious (Blue) from 2007. Xiuzhen’s starting point for this work is a bread van, which she cut in two and she connected the front and the back with a harmonica-like tube made out of strips of clothing stitched together. In a city where most people used to own bicycles rather than cars, owning a bread van was the aspiration of many. The first car that Xiuzhen’s family owned carried many stories and memories, and stories and memories of numerous other families are woven into the multitude of colourful fabrics. In her words: ‘Even though, as a viewer looking at the clothes, you may just see the material, in fact, they’ve been worn by different people. [...] They carry so many invisible things.’
Xiuzhen’s fascination with clothes goes back to some of her earliest memories. During her childhood and youth in China, fabrics were rationed, and she describes having new clothes, painstakingly sewn by her mother, only for Lunar New Year. For the rest of the year, clothes would be passed down from family members or cut and patched up when they became too small. Whilst her mother worked in a factory that produced custom-made clothing for foreign export, the scarcity of Xiuzhen’s own clothes made each garment special, carrying memories of people, places and events that surrounded each piece. This is commemorated in My Clothes (1995/2021), where a number of old skirts, dresses, shirts and other items are carefully folded, stitched into a neat square and individually presented framed and hanging on a wall. Each one is accompanied by a text in which the artist tells the stories they all carry.
Many of the works on display use fabric and cement; according to the artist, she sees one as a building material for constructing the individual, the other for constructing society. At the same time, there are works that offer a glimpse into many of her other artistic practices, ranging from photography, ceramics, installation and performance art. Xiuzhen’s academic training was, however, very different. In 1985 she was accepted into Beijing Normal Academy to study painting. ‘At the time, China wasn’t very open yet, and because my teacher had studied in the Soviet Union we were learning the Soviet style. Realism - socialist realism’, she recalls. That same year, she saw an exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg held at the National Art Gallery in Beijing, which had a profound effect on her understanding of art and was the first event that started to open her horizons to contemporary art practices beyond China. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s, however, that she started working in media other than oil painting.
With her interest in themes of modernisation, globalisation, environmental and social change, Xiuzhen’s art has long bridged the gap between China and the West. Over recent decades her photographs and objects have been sold at international auctions and her works are held by public collections ranging from the Tate and Centre Pompidou to museums in Hong Kong, Japan and Australia among many others.
The final work at the exhibition, the eponymous A Heart to Heart (2025, work in progress), is a giant heart-shaped construction made of fabrics in different shades of red and pink. We are invited to walk around the work, as well as to enter it and sit on the cushions, presumably with the idea of contemplating the journey that Xiuzhen’s art has just taken us on. Despite its bright red colour and the holes where a human heart would meet the arteries, this is a work of great beauty, with little to evoke the bloody gruesomeness of an actual organ. Instead, the colourful exterior and cosy, mesmerising interior of A Heart to Heart feel more like a work of art for the Instagram generation than one that would provoke ‘deep and meaningful conversations’ that the wall label invites us to engage in. In this, too, Yin Xiuzhen’s art speaks to a global audience, erasing boundaries between East and West.
