Hu Yinping

     Hu Yinping, born in the countryside of Sichuan，China in 1983. She is a drifter in Beijing, and an atypical writer-director. The environment and experiences are the soil of her work. She has had several solo exhibitions at Arrow Space (2016), Mocube (2016) and Venice (2017). She also participated in many group exhibitions held by important galleries such as PACE Gallery (2014) and Klein Sun Gallery in New York, PIAC in Paris and the Kommunale Galerie in Berlin (2017). She is a founding member of the “@ PARTY” collective (2012). At the moment Hu lives and works in Beijing，China.

Xiao Fang
Story, video
dimensions variable
2015-ongoing
Xiao Fang was inspired by Hu Yinping’s own story. At the beginning of 2015 when she went back to her hometown in Sichuan to find her mother and some other women in town were knitting inferior yarn head-wear and sold them for pennies. Then she came back to Beijing and asked her friend Xiao Fang to approach her mother and pretend to be a buyer but paying higher price for those head-wears. To run the business, her mother learned and mastered modern tools such as internet, WeChat, online bank, etc. This helped her mother became more confident and more aware of her value. Thereafter, she displayed her creative mind in more than one hundred unusual head-wear.
At the beginning of 2017, the project was showed at the Arrow Factory in Beijing. These head-wears interested some buyers, but Hu Yinping felt reluctant to sell since she collect them as a representation of her mother’s time. Then her mother told her that many women in town showed their desire to join her head-wear workshop. After that, Hu Yinping gathered them around to produce head-wears, and founded the brand HU Xiao Fang, which enabled more town-hood mothers to make head-wear and put their previously ignored creativity on display. Hu Xiao Fang is now a proprietary trademark registered in China and France. With its debut on April 22, 2017, Hu Xiao Fang is still under operation with Hu Yinping’s mother and the women in town yet to know.
Founded at the end of 2015, the project Xiao Fang is now 4 years old. The white lie which Hu Yinping told her mother has been knitting a network connecting and changing both personal lives of the women and the economy in town. There is a room in the center of the town designated to be the place for knitters to gather and solicit suggestions, store yarns and interact with each other. The place is so popular that it has taken the place of local mahjong clubs. The video of knitters gathering showed on the small display was captured by the security camera in the room. The campaign is domino like and has impact on everyone who is engaged. The elder women found a way out and earned a living from their creation.Meanwhile,they also regained their confidence and their social circles.
The exhibition will bring the project Xiao Fang to Hangzhou and invite local people to join the project by knitting a giant green head-wear to apply for a world record and sell it. If the work is collected, the benefit will be evenly split to every contributor during the exhibition.

Xiao Fang

Xiao Fang

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