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

This paper considers a series of artworks made by the Chinese artist Yin Xiuzhen since the mid-1990s. The majority of Yin’s works are constructed from intimate and familiar everyday materials, second-hand clothes in particular. Through her creative and manifold acts of placing, sewing, knitting and packing, Yin reveals living stories and human emotions concealed in seemingly trivial and unremarkable household items, investigating the drastic changes to people’s lives in mainland China as well as in other parts of the world over the past two decades, especially in consideration of rapid urbanization and the pervasive development of global trade networks. This paper draws on Iris Marion Young’s conception of ‘preservation’ – a devalued yet significant aspect of ‘home-making’. As Young argues, preservation, which is typically associated with female domesticity, not only maintains things at home against their possible destruction, but constantly endows those objects with new meaning in so doing to sustain individual identity and familial history. By relating Yin’s creative engagements with domesticity to YOung’s arguments about preservation, this paper examines how might Yin’s artistic practice of reclaiming old domestic objects provoke interactions and reveal contradictions between human bodies and their ever-changing living environments, challenging the traditional feminist negative evaluation of women’s housework and providing a distinctive insight into the notion of home and one’s sense of belonging.