[3] After graduation, Yin taught at the high school attached to the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, until her exhibition schedule became too demanding.
Thus, creating of a sense of community and belonging within the audience (Teo 2016, 205).”[5] Yin's art has been greatly influenced by her impoverished upbringing during the time of the Cultural Revolution, a socio-political movement from 1966 to 1976.
In an interview, she states, “the CR (Cultural Revolution) created more “hardships” and “bitterness” and regret” for the generations before us, it left me—young and naïve—with memories of “ideals,” “magnificence,” “collectivity”...(creating) contradictions and conflicts between isolation and openness, dictatorship and democracy became a new motivation, and as rapid changes cultivated in me an attitude of calm and quiet (Joo, Keehn, Ham-Roberts, 232).” [6] As a child in the Cultural Revolution, Yin Xiuzhen found a creative outlet in the act of sewing, which has become a monumental component in her artistic practices.
[8] Xiuzhen's utilization of the various mediums such as fabric, found objects, and concrete added to the tactile interest and depth to her politically and socially charged works.
[9] Yin spoke to Phaidon about how the Robert Rauschenberg exhibition inspired her, saying “I realized that the language of art should no longer be restricted to mediums and tools of painting and sculpture, which were what we had studied.
In premodern China, women upon marriage would pack their suitcases and were forced to abandon her family and village in order to fulfill her duties as an obedient wife.
In an interview with Phaidon, Yin discusses her inspiration for the Portable City series and states, “I place emphasis on difference, but no matter how I emphasize it, it's always covered over by sameness”.
For example, in one piece entitled Ruined City constructed at the Capital Normal University in 1996, Yin took 1,400 grey roof tiles, rubble, and objects directly from the site of a demolished building in Beijing and she used personal possessions such as a set of four wooden chairs from her marriage with Song Dong; transformed it into an installation piece that commemorated the essence of a city that was lost in the process of modernization.
In 1995, as part of a public art event called "Keepers of the Waters" in Chengdu organized by American ecofeminist artist Betsy Damon, Yin created Washing the River, a performance piece involving ten cubic meters of frozen river water that she invited the public to wash until they melted away.
[12] These installations sought to raise awareness about the conflicting relationships between the social and natural in world in China during the time of global post modernization.
Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World at the Guggenheim Featuring works by Pace artists, such as Yin Xiuzhen, Song Dong, and Zhang Xiaogang, the exhibition explores works whose “critical provocations aim to forge reality free from ideology, to establish the individual apart from the collective, and to define contemporary Chinese experience in universal terms.” [20] From the end of the Cold War in 1989 to the Beijing Olympics in 2008, it surveys the culture of artistic experimentation during a time in the globalization and rise of a newly powerful China to a world stage.
A girl curled up gripping her knees on a plane, Yin Xiuzhen has seized our era's disposition as vague, anxious, and riddled with crisis.
Her new works are composed mainly of porcelain and metal material that was destroyed and reconstructed by her intuition and persistent power before there's nothing left but the debris, all referring to the unbearable reality.
Her largest work in perspective, titled Trojan, is a large scale installation part of her series, provides a spiritual sanctuary for the individual in turmoil.