Beijing’s Yin Xiuzhen teams up with Hong Kong residents in trying to find an artistic solution to closing the gaps left in the sky in the wake of the pandemic. Chitralekha Basu reports.

Yin created the hanging suitcases installation in the Sky Patch show as a response to COVID-19, with the hope that it will inspire a sense of healing and community bonding. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Open suitcases. Static conveyor belts. X-Ray machines with no luggage to pass through.

Such images, created by the artist Yin Xiuzhen, underscore the paralytic effect COVID-19 continues to have on the aviation industry. This is particularly true of an international transit hub like Hong Kong, which now sees barely 2 percent of the several millions who would pass through the city’s international airport every month only a year ago.

Yin, who is from Beijing, and the first artist from the Chinese mainland to have a solo show commissioned by Centre for Heritage, Art and Textiles (CHAT), could not be in Hong Kong, owing to the pandemic-related travel restrictions. Fans of community art projects pitched in to complete what Yin had begun. Of the 15 open-lid fabric-made suitcase shapes hung from the glass-topped main atrium of CHAT — the centerpiece of her exhibition, called Sky Patch — seven were completed by Hong Kong residents who had responded to an open call to join a sewing workshop where layers of recycled clothing were added to the basic frame, in keeping with the artist’s brief.

Yin Xiuzhen’s Dress Box series is an attempt to look for human attributes in worn clothes while Round Fan highlights the fraught relationship between clothes and wearer. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

At a time when travel is ruled out for most people, Yin wanted to create a slightly quirky airport terminal experience in Sky Patch. Visitors, rather than cargo, were scanned by X-Ray machines, on their way in. Yarns from their clothing were collected during the “security check” and added to a growing mosaic on the wall. 

“Against the backdrop of pandemic, unstable political situations, broken relationships across society and an uncertain outlook on the humanities and the arts, the sky this year seems to have been torn,” says Yin. She wanted to create a space where people who are beginning to feel jaded by social distancing fatigue might “come together in exchange and dialogue, and patch up the sky, and create a suitcase for the community.” 

Clothes as memory

Sky Patch could look like a cornucopia of recycled clothing. Yin has created rag doll versions of architectural landmarks of the world’s premier cities such as the palace of Westminster and Kremlin that hang upside down from her suspended suitcases. Slices of recognizable urban landscapes spill out of open suitcases laid out on the floor. Worn garments are piled up next to rows of vintage sewing machines. 

Yin Xiuzhen’s Dress Box series is an attempt to look for human attributes in worn clothes while Round Fan highlights the fraught relationship between clothes and wearer. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

However, Wang Weiwei, who curated the show, says recycling may not be the most important thing about the artist’s practice.

“Using collected materials is a way for Yin to explore and engage with materials marked with strong traces of those who inhabited them,” says Wang. “The second-hand clothes she uses are sourced from people with vastly different experiences. Gathering of clothes is an attempt to stitch all these diverse experiences together, and allow for conflicts to exist within the work itself.”

And that includes internal conflicts experienced by the artist as well. Around 1994-95, Yin began Dress Box — a project in which she folded a selection of the clothes she had worn at different times over 30 years of her life, stitched them up along the folds and photographed them. From tiny A-line frocks Yin wore as a child to the lace-embellished blouse she wore to her wedding to functional chequered shirts — each item in the series, in which a sense of the wearer’s presence has been frozen in time, is like a narration unto itself.     

Yin Xiuzhen wanted to create a community experience of viewers connecting through stitching activity in her Sky Patch show. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Six decades of China

Sky Patch is also Yin’s attempt to read the story of her family in the context of China’s recent textile history. In a film running on a loop at the exhibition, Yin is seen stitching in the company of her octogenarian parents and teenage daughter. In a way, the show is a homage to the artist’s mother, who was a cotton mill worker covering a time span that included the Cultural Revolution years (1966—76). Hence the installation conjuring up a factory set-up with parallel rows of manually operated sewing machines, a row of blank red rectangles (which in the Maoist era would have contained a political slogan) on the wall and tasselled suede pennants that would be used to display textile mill brand names but have been left blank as well by the artist. 

Wang, however, says, there might be tensions embedded in what looks like a cosy, family video. 

“Yin’s concept is about the conflict and differences between the three generations in her family. Their distinct eras have created these divides,” says Wang. “From her mother’s generation enduring the Cultural Revolution, to herself, having witnessed China’s rapid development in the past six decades, to her daughter growing up in the digital age with smartphones. In all this, they must co-exist, love each other, and struggle, and deal with their individual lives.” 

If you go

Yin Xiuzhen: Sky Patch

Curated by Wang Weiwei

Date: Through Feb 28, 2021

Venue: CHAT, The Mills, 45 Pak Tin Par Street, Tsuen Wan, Hong Kong

www.mill6chat.org/event/yin-xiuzhen-sky-patch/