Artists who are not good at over-interpreting will always sew “stories” into the texture of artwork.
As editing this album, we suggest (or ask) artists to provide a brief description of their work so that the reader/ viewer can find some “threads” in their understanding. We hope that the description provided by the artist will be objective, accurate and indifferent as the label of the work or the description of an industrial product. The depth and breadth of ideas in contemporary art are interwoven with the comprehensiveness of the works. Artists don’t have any attitude of resistance. The materials, techniques, styles and reasons selected by the artists hide different clues. Only the “threads” are removed can the artist look inside. As for the works themselves, Yin Xiuzhen has given a detailed explanation. What I want to do is to try to find out the correlation between these works and the reasons behind them. The maximum cultural transmission is all kinds of images or art stories set up in the classical sense. Accordingly, people’s visual experience is gradually accumulated, however, it has different way to do with contemporary art in the strategy and value judgment. At the time of material in the contemporary artistic creation and means in shaping the physical form of the works used by artists, their original language related to generate new ideas, source and knowledge expression system is more complicated. For example, if you don’t understand the relationship between the material properties of cement and clothes and Yin Xiuzhen’s personal experience and creation history, you will miss the meaning of “Weight of experience” from the traditional sculpture language.
In the artistic environment where is the emphasis of standpoint, principle and concept supremacy, “storytelling” always seems to be out of place. This brings to mind the narrative text that first moves from text to image and then image to text. One of the main objects of the modern revolution in art is to be the maidservant of literature, especially when the stories in true or false are preset, and the artist’s job is giving such an endorsement to the craft -- obviously, the revolution has not succeeded, and the latter still has a large number of fans in today’s creation under the name of art. However, for artists who take reality as the creation object, the object itself is fresh and the creation aimed at reality will not be outdated. The validity of presenting and expressing such freshness tests the artist's creative ability in the existing artistic methods. According to the understanding of Yin Xiuzhen’s husband, the artist Song Dong, Yin Xiuzhen’s creation type which “centered on personal experience and life” is connected with Andrew H. Plaks’s statement that “the essence and meaning of life experience are communicated to others by telling stories”1. The difference lies in the language they use. Andrew H. Plaks pointed out in his study of Chinese narratology that there are two voices in narration: “one is the voice of the event itself and the other is the voice of the narrator, also known as the ‘narrator's voice’. The tone of voice by the narrator is sometimes more important than the event itself.”2When we expand the “events” in the novel to the more inclusive “issues” in contemporary art, this “tone” corresponds to the artists’ creative methods and the ideas to be supported. In Yin Xiuzhen’s works, “weaving” is not a modifier. Not only a lot of her works are made in fiber (old cloth), but also her existence experience and life experience are as kind of extension. She wrote a remark in her work “Time Fiber”: Time is the fiber of life. It weaves experience, memory, temperature and emotion together to form a universe of mental and emotional.”

Yin Xiuzhen’s works are highly accomplished. They show the artist’s skills and angles in dealing with complex problems by needle and thread. The materials she uses have a natural affinity with both professional and non-professional people, especially the fiber which is not easy to be noticed in daily life but indispensable in life. It is interesting to relate this to the phenomenon that Walter Benjamin mentioned when he talked about the disappearance of the art of storytelling. He says: “it no longer exists that people listen to stories while they spin… That is the reason that the art of storytelling woven hundreds of thousands of years ago in the oldest atmosphere of artisanal production is now unraveling.” 3Because contemporary art in information transfer and accept shares a similar situation, we might as well do the lines in the discussion of fiber art. So when looking at Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art, we will find that a lot of craftsmanship forgotten by many artists is still valuable ability to “exchange experience”. In the flow of ideas, sometimes even artists themselves are not necessarily get consciousness.
Yin Xiuzhen is “a person with stories”. It is said that everything in her and Song Dong’s studio has a story. She exchanges stories with herself, her family and strangers. On the basis of personal experience, Yin Xiuzhen also interspersed with the experience of the world in her works. The value of her works is realized through the audiences’ participation and experience (such as her works “Digestive Cavity” and “Introspective Cavity”); Some artworks’ creation / production process is completed with public participation (e.g., her work “Walking, Thinking”). In either case, the experience of the public is activated in the name of art and becomes part of artwork. Shoes is the carrier of flesh as well as the material or object that Yin Xiuzhen has used from the 1990s. In her work “Walking, owner of the 500 pairs of shoes) “stories” and “action” which including shoes collected by the owner as well as audience actions, emotions and stories after work completion of the wandering between “shoes” and “jungle of legs”. Yin Xiuzhen said: “I feel uneasy to take other people’s precious things as my own. Because I might not give it up easily.” She is “the biggest beneficiary” and she uses her works to tell the stories of others.4

Her work “Walking, Thinking” is about “walking”. Many of Yin Xiuzhen’s works are about travelling, such as the series “portable city”. In the book The Art of Travel, what Alain de Botton said makes sense: “travel makes you think.”5However, labor-type artists as Yin Xiuzhen are the majority of the crowd and they almost have nothing to do with the kind of leisurely, spiritual imaginary literary travel in their trips. Modern vehicles are speeding up the human clock, the “journey” is merely the physical delivery. It's a quite long suffering after arrival and before departure. The experience of “speeding-up” can quickly be overwhelmed by negative emotions. In WeChat group, Yin Xiuzhen was “forced” to response to work by typing a line of words: “we are at the airport on the way home. I will reply you soon after taking careful look of messages. Now I’m feeling dizzy and sick in the car.” (emoji included) But, for all that, it doesn't stop people from taking a trip. From the famous painting The Picture of Traveling in Guanshan Mountain in Song Dynasty to a series of writers and artists listed by Alain de Botton, the meaning of travel changes greatly. From perspective of phenomenon, it can be divided into two categories: one is the popular symbolic sharing in the social platform for their anticipated consumption (one part of those expectations is from the description of mass culture, especially the pop music; other part is from friends’ updated travel photos in wechat moments which still can used to define “fugue + games”), another one is to put the specific vehicle (and its associated objects) for emotional projection. It is quite different from the worship of transportation forces by contemporary artists, the artists as Yin Xiuzhen regard these things as the witness of experience and even the experience itself, such as the airport luggage transport belt (the work “International Airport: Terminal 1”), the aircraft landing gear (the work “nowhere to land”) and tail pipes used in the car in the work “Planting” (2018). From the perspective of the user,she gives the cold industrial products with brand-new life.
Her work “Trojan Horse” comes from the series “Digestive Cavity”. It amplified a standard striking resistant posture as the passengers in danger by taking flight. Although it is not comparable with the series of ceramic “vessel” in the dimension and material, all of them showed the feeling of dignity and lofty (or someone said the feeling of “monumental”) in the gap of life. There are her other works “7” and “21 grams” as comparative objects. They discuss the transformation of life between people and things. In recent years, Yin Xiuzhen often resides in Jingdezhen to conduct various ceramic experiments. In the series of ceramic “vessel”, the contingency of ceramics in the firing process after the intervention of different media -- such as the firing of metal and ceramics together. This is a natural extension of Yin Xiuzhen's series of works about collision among shoes, butter and cement. She started to turn from human experience to the soul of things, and presented the contradiction, sense of power and complexity between different things in the process of creation in the reverse movement. They secretly contended with each other.

Yin Xiuzhen’s cherishing of “things” is not the traditional or Japanese-style “cherishing things” but comes from the deep imprint left by the era of materia deprivation she has experienced. Life has educated people. It reminds me of the old saying, “three years in the new, three years in the old and three years in mending.” Sewing is a kind of behavior as well as the material view extracted from folk experience. It is not clear whether Yin Xiuzhen's efforts to stitch together between travel (open) and package (closed) and between interior and exterior will ease the anxiety of a fast life, however, she hopes to provide a “relief ”. Most of Yin Xiuzhen’s experiences are from ongoing “travel”. No matter how violent and dangerous content, she always wraps up the sharp side. This is the “lyric” tone she often used to tell stories and this kind of lyric works of femininity and material properties also comes from the practice of chaotic street life.
However, don’t take for granted to associate “sentiment” with “poetry and the distance”. Yin Xiuzhen’s travelling and walking in the art are neither dispelling the meaning of “on the road” nor making a fuss about an imaginary illness. I prefer to put the unconsciousness in the theory as a continuity on the ideal in Chinese “left” literature and art . These close-knit but incompatible problems were not forced to be gathered by me. They had been “stitched” together in the work “Commune”. The commonly used material, technology, material concept and social problematic consciousness were all shown in this work. The work Commune, which took place in Chemnitz (formerly known as the city of Karl Marx) the former German Democratic Republic, lost its central status as a textile hub in the middle ages after the end of the cold war and the industrial shift that began with globalization. Yin Xiuzhen invited people who good at sewing in the city to participate into the project, cutting all kinds of old clothes into strips, building a space of 10 meters in diameter and 5 meters in height. She and participators sewed with their own hands and left only some holes to see the work site inside. In methods of presenting, the works “Commune” and “Walking, Thinking” are in the same type, however, the former has a concrete connection with the emotion, experience and world view of Chinese people in the twentieth century. For Chinese people in the middle of the 20th century, “commune” was a very specific symbol from the ideal experiment of international communism in the early days to a series of social practices of grassroots organizations in China. As the carrier of industrialization and globalization, the stories of ordinary people hidden behind the textile are closely related to the changes of the world's political situation. The responsibility of “creating a cocoon of oneself ” is vague. The role textile plays in the globalization was concerned by many artists since the industrial revolution, including the work “Nations” by Indian artist N. S. Harsha and “Unravelled” by artists group Unkown Filed. The perspective of the work “Commune” is not only different from others, but also different from her previous works. It is an instinctive reaction cultivated by her generation of artists/Chinese. In 2008, the work “Commune” was never made public again when it was made, finished and exhibited in Chemnitz. 11 years later, it was shown again in such an environment. The story of the unknown sewing worker became clearer and stronger.

1.(US) Andrew H. Plaks, Chinese Narrative, Peking, Peking University Press, 1996:5-6.
2.(US) Andrew H. Plaks, Chinese Narrative, Peking, Peking University Press, 1996:14.
3.(Germany) Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Peking, SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2015.
4.Luo Ying, the essay “She has artistic possession of what is the most precious to others”, from magazine “HI ART”, 2018-10-10.
5.Written by Alain de Botton and translated by Nan Zhiguo, Peng Junhao and He Shiyuan, the book “The Art of Travel”, Shanghai, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2012:59.