‘Fabricating’ Social Conviviality: Yin Xiuzhen’s Transcultural (Dis) identification

Abstract

This paper focuses on two socially-engaged, participatory works by Chinese artist Yin Xiuzhen, International Airport Terminal I (2006) and Commune (2008), which were both created and first exhibited in Germany. Unlike Yin’s earlier participatory artworks, which reconsidered and restaged a conventional indigenous mode of Chinese communal dwelling, the two works discussed in this paper were based in the places where Yin had her artistic residencies and lived for a short period of time. In her works, Yin constructs a fluid, interactive communal space for herself and embodied viewers, albeit via heavily mediated means, to participate, experience and explore a particular aspect of local life, forging various forms of inter-bodily, intersubjective and intercultural communication and (dis)identification. Yin’s works investigate not only the temporary social connectedness and conviviality of artistic participation, but also those instances of contradiction and rejection that are part and parcel of attempts at collective cohesion and cross-cultural exchange, providing a distinctive insight into the practice of socially-engaged art within the increasingly interconnected, yet asymmetrically developed globalizing contemporary art world. This paper examines how Yin’s works might give rise to both interconnections and frictions between local and global, promoting mutual understanding, yet refusing to contrive an illusion of harmonious reconciliation; in what ways these two works reveal Yin’s collaboration and negotiation with international art institutions; and how an artwork, which tends to create a hospitable, convivial environment for interactive public engagement, might engender a totally divergent experience of participation marked by confusion and exclusion, due to the deficiency of intercultural understanding.