Yin Xiuzhen’s Fabrication of ‘Home’: A Legacy of Caring and Domestic Preservation

Abstract

This paper considers a series of artworks made by Chinese artist Yin Xiuzhen since the mid-1990s. The majority of Yin’s works are constructed from familiar household items, second-hand clothes in particular. Through her creative and manifold acts of placing, sewing, knitting and packing, Yin investigates issues of rapid urbanization, the pervasive development of global trade networks, and unprecedented transnational flows and cross-cultural exchanges, which all, in certain way, disrupt the stability and groundedness of identity and home. In this paper, I would suggest Yin’s artistic practice of employing repetitive, banal labour, typically associated with female domesticity, demonstrates an overlooked, yet significant aspect of caring and cultivation in the formation of ‘home’ and one’s sense of belonging, which feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young proposes as a form of ‘preservation’. According to Young, preservation not only maintains things at home against their possible destruction, but constantly endows those objects with new social and cultural meaning in so doing to sustain individual identity and familial history. This paper examines how Yin’s practice of engaging with seemingly trivial, unremarkable domesticity might articulate an alternative, reciprocally constructive process of ‘homemaking’, which fabricates and refabricates moments of grounding in place and in relation to other subjects that interrupt a constant state of transition and precariousness; and in what ways Yin’s works might challenge the normative accounts of social advancement, global capitalism and international migration, which often push women aside, forging immediate social connectedness across regional, national and cultural boundaries without negating inevitable conflicts and disparities.