Yin Xiuzhen grew up in a working-class family in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. Although she was interested in making pictures and crafts, such interests found little room to grow at a time when Chinese art was reduced to portraying Chairman Mao and the ‘revolutionary masses’ in a monotonous, symbolic style. She expressed her artistic talent mainly by sewing and knitting clothes for family members.

After graduating from high school in 1981, she set her heart on studying painting at university, a goal that had become possible after the end of the Cultural Revolution. For the next four years, she worked in a construction firm as an interior painter while spending evenings preparing for the entrance exam. In 1985, she entered the Department of Fine Arts at the Capital Normal University. Among her classmates was Song Dong, whom she would marry and form a life-long partnership with.

Like many other experimental artists of her generation, Yin abandoned canvas and paint after graduating from university in favour of more contemporary forms, such as installation, site-specific art, and performance. In her first group of non-painting works, produced between 1994 and 1995, her unusual sensitivity to the natural, material world is already apparent. Working with young, like-minded artists such as Song Dong and Zhu Jinshi, she created two of the earliest works of Land Art in China: The Tree of Parting (1994) and Tree Lute (1995).

Her other projects from this period attest to her deepening concerns with history and memory, identity, and relationships. Among these, Dress Box (1995) combines three components that she would employ continuously to great effect over the next two decades: old clothing, cement, and suitcases. Yin explains her fascination with used clothing in the short essay, ‘About Clothes’:

Why do I use old clothes as materials? It’s because I’ve always been interested in people’s life experiences . . . I feel that clothes are like a second skin; they have their own expressive language and are connected with their times and therefore with history. I started using old clothing in 1995 as an important material and element in my works. At the beginning, I gathered my own old clothing from my childhood to the present to create Dress Box. In this work, I used cement to seal clothes I’d worn over thirty years in a suitcase that my father had made and which I’d used for many years. I inscribed these words [on a bronze plaque] inside the suitcase’s lid: ‘These clothes are the clothes that I’ve worn over the past three decades; they carry my experiences, memory, and physical traces of time.’ ^[1]

The installation resulted from a silent, solemn performance. Yin unpacked her old clothes in an empty gallery at the Beijing Contemporary Art Museum. She folded each piece of clothing into a flat rectangle and sewed up the edges so that they could never be opened again. She then laid these rectangles on the ground in rows, carefully packed them in the suitcase, attached the inscribed bronze plaque to the inside of the lid, and finally sealed them in the suitcase with cement mortar.

The performance/installation can be interpreted as a symbolic burial for the artist herself, since the sealed clothes were a ‘second skin’ shed from her body.^[2] The work signifies Yin’s self-invention as well as her yearning for survival—a complex, poignant meaning that captures her experience at this moment of rebirth as she rejected her formal academic education and embraced experimental art.

To Yin, the significance of used clothing goes beyond a means to convey personal memories. ‘[Old clothes] bear traces of people’s lived experiences,’ she writes. ‘Over a decade I’ve gathered together such “experiences” from numerous people in many countries, including my family, friends and strangers, forming a new “collective” with a hidden subconscious. Experiences can’t be duplicated. What I’ve done is to “stitch” these fragmentary experiences together so that they can start a new life.’^[3]

A work that Yin created in 1995 had already begun to manifest this idea. Titled Yarn and shown at the Beijing Contemporary Art Museum, it includes two piles of worn jumpers she had collected from her family members. The colourful ones in one pile belonged to women, while the grey and blue ones in the other pile belonged to men. Some jumpers had been unravelled, and the strands of material formed two heaps of loose yarn in the foreground, with which the artist began to knit a new jumper or scarf. Transforming old clothing into new items, the work conveys Yin’s idea of ‘“stitch[ing]” fragmentary experiences together so they can start a new life’.

Two years later, she created a similar installation called Unravel/Knit at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York. In 2000, she made another work called Construction Material at the Gertrude Contemporary Art Space in Melbourne. On these two occasions, however, Yin collected old clothes from residents of these cities. Although she had no personal relationship with the donors and knew little about their lives, the two installations generated local sentiment because of Yin’s belief in the transcultural significance of old clothes as memory-bearing objects. In her words, ‘these collected clothes are actually the condensations of people. They had once been wrapped around warm bodies. Even after entering my work, they still radiate warmth of a spiritual kind.’^[4]

Memory continued to enliven Yin’s works in the 2000s, especially when these works utilised old clothing. One representative project from this period, Collective Subconscious, consists of a series of altered minibuses. Each of these rectangular vehicles is cut in half. Between the two ends, Yin added a long, accordion-like tunnel covered with a quilt made from used clothes. Entering the inconspicuous minivan, viewers find themselves transported to a magical space, as they are bathed in soft, multicoloured light filtered through the clothes, and as they hear familiar old songs from bygone days.

Yin’s intention, however, is not to arouse a vague feeling of nostalgia, but to revisit a specific moment in her life and in China’s modern history. During the early phase of China’s economic boom in the 1980s, this type of minivan, nicknamed xiao mianbao, or ‘little loaf of bread’, became a symbol of financial well-being, independence, and mobility. Yin recalls: ‘If you could afford to take a “bread taxi” or drive your own “little bread”, you had a happy life that someone would covet . . . It became something that stood for people’s hopes and aspirations at that time.’^[5] To emphasise the idea of ‘everyone’, she used over four hundred pieces of old clothing to extend a vehicle, turning a ‘little bread’ into a fifteen-metre-long public bus, resulting in, as she puts it, ‘a mixture of collectivist idealism and compressed realism’.^[6]