In a previous post we looked at Jimmie Durham's sculptures of animals, assemblages of everyday materials integrating also second-hand clothes. There are quite a few contemporary artists who employ in their practice discarded clothes, among them also Yin Xiuzhen, currently included in the 58th International Art Exhibition in Venice.
Born in Beijing where she lives and works, the Chinese artist has been using recycled materials in her sculptures since the early 1990s.
Collecting and transforming clothes and fabrics has got a special meaning for the artist as they represent empty shells left behind by other people, they are full of experiences and emotions, and allow the artist to add a social twist to her works.
Quite often clothes are combined with other materials (such as industrial objects, suitcases and assorted debris) to make a critique of consumption and globalisation, forces that defined China from 1989 on.
In the Arsenale section of the Biennale there is a giant sculpture entitled "Trojan" and made with clothes: from a distance you may think it was made with a mountain of coloured rags, but then when you get closer and realise that the artist used jumpers, tops and shirts as they were, without cutting them.
The sculpture represents a passenger curled over in an airplane seat in the position you may see on inflight safety cards.
Not far from this piece there is a two wheel hub ("Nowhere to Land") wrapped in black fabric and suspended in midair. With their scale both pieces point at pessimism and apolcalypse, at inevitable disasters and tragedies.
In the Giardini's Central Pavilion, there are two further works by Yin Xiuzhen, "Bookshelf No. 7" and " Dong Fang Hong I". The former consists in a wooden shelf wrapped in fabric and lined with cloth books. Colour tones, textures and decorative elements such as labels and buttons along the spines are all meticulously arranged.
Each volume is made with a discarded piece of clothing that belonged to a person (if you read the labels accompanying Yin Xiuzhen's installations, you will realise that, among the materials listed to make the pieces, there are "clothes worn by different people" to highlight the importance of the garments as guardians of memories), so that the library is a sort of memorial to a group of human beings.
The second piece is a reinvented version of the first satellite launched by China in 1970: the work is made with metal sheets, but, if you look carefully, you will see something protruding from the seams of the satellite - bits and pieces of colourful second-hand clothes and fabrics.
These textile debris hint again at people and at the lives of those human beings neglected and sacrificed in the name of discoveries and progress.
An exhaust pipe mounted on the top of this unusual satellite reminds indeed to visitors of the pollution created by our collective race towards an unsustainable development.
In many ways Yin Xiuzhen's future is gloomy and dystopical - there are indeed no human beings in her world, but just the clothes they left behind, almost pointing at everyday repetitive actions such as dressing and undressing that can physically, individually and socially change us in unexpectedly dramatic ways.
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