All around us, there are small things that capture the coded poetics of the universe, and in Chinese artist Yin Xiuzhen’s latest exhibition at the Power Station of Art (PSA), they manifest in the form of the highlight from one’s eyes, worn shoes and meticulously piled dust.
Visitors are welcomed into the PSA through Yin’s vessel-like installation, Piercing the Sky (2024), which lends the exhibition its title. Equal parts tractor, sedan and plane, the flying machine invites participants into its belly and to gaze upwards to a mosaic of clothing donated by the public to the artist. Referred to by Yin as a person’s “second skin”, these clothes are repositories of memory and identity, with shades of black and grey morphing into a saturated, translucent fissure where the needle punctures the ‘sky’.
This thread of collaborative, and almost communal, art-making is even more palpable in the following two colossal installations. Action and Reflection in Shanghai (2024) gathers 100 pairs of shoes and their stories in a tactile and sentimental display of longing, heartbreak and vulnerabilities. The lumpy, dough-like legs from which each shoe hangs border on the repulsive and, yet, their stories spur profound tenderness. Nearby, 1080 breaths of air take their shape as glass droplets (1080 Breaths at PSA Shanghai), embodying a meditative and ritualistic quality.
Yin is an artist who is gifted with the ability to perceive the world in ways that may not be obvious to most. In Screen Wall of Gaze (2024), she captures highlights and reflections from the eyes of friends and other readily available material, such as books and magazines, to create a wall that scatters them like “windows to the soul”. Appearing almost like glassy insect wings, these hoarded fragments are perhaps the closest we’ll ever get to understanding our world through the eyes of another.
The artist sees the trajectory of her life through dust, which she collects and piles onto narrow steel bars that criss-cross one sectioned gallery space (Mass of Dust), disrupting the sanitary white cube where art and life are encouraged to stay politely discrete.
There is a softness and physicality that never strays too far away from Yin’s works, aided by the velvety white drapes that frame much of the inner exhibition space. Here, viewers wander through corridor after corridor of some vastly different pieces bound by a central ethos that explores perception and philosophy through the mundane.
Her sonic structure, Tower of Sound (2023-24), with stretches of skin-toned nylon stockings over what looks like a futuristic cosmic weapon, is further testimony to the artist’s desire to juxtapose hard and soft, absolute and uncertainty.
In a pitch black, largely empty room, Golden Horn (2024) encapsulates the universe through the critical but sympathetic lens of a romantic. The audio installation plays the Voyager Golden Record that was launched into space in 1977, with sounds of human civilisation that would only be heard by extraterrestrials should they encounter the spacecraft (or exist at all). The fact that the record is playing is an introspection on our existence as a species – drifting in the vast interstellar space, only 0.12 of a pixel in size.
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Yin is neither naive nor idealistic, but what Piercing the Sky communicates is her faith in collectivity – in people coming together and the possibilities of this union without stripping anyone of their individuality.
Yin Xiuzhen: Piercing the Sky is on view at the Power Station of Art, Shanghai, until 16 February 2025; free.
