Yin Xiuzhen’s textile architecture Commune (2008), reminiscent of a rotunda, is the legacy of a collective work process, thereby becoming a memorial monument with local reference. As in her earlier works, for example in the vast, expansive installation International Airport Terminal I (2007), the reconstruction of an airport hall; or in the sculpture series Portable Cities (since 2003), in which she reproduces urban topographies in fabric and packs them in suitcases, in Commune the artist uses cast-off clothing donated by the residents of the site where the work was created. Yin employs used clothing as a metaphor for the human individual in the sense of existential traces that are reanimated in the installations. Thus, in realizing Commune, she collaborated with local seamstresses, and the workshop that testifies to this remained in the interior of the sculpture.

Commune was created in Chemnitz, once an important center of the European textile industry. Through its reference to forms of living shaped by socialism, which had a defining role for the biographies of this artist from China as it did for many Chemnitz residents, the work’s title points to the past as well. Although the relationship between the individual and society has, especially in China, fundamentally changed, for the artist those early experiences are seminal, and still leave their mark on the present. Her recurrent theme is the mediation of individual experience with the collective memory. Commune, too, is a site of constructive memory work. Borrowing from Beuys’ concept of the “social sculpture,” Yin encourages collective activity in order to influence societal structures. The artist thereby adheres to an anthropological concept of art. With what seems an almost sacred quality, the architecture of Commune offers shelter and is simultaneously a site of faith in social communication and the individual’s ability to make a difference.

Born in Beijing in 1963, Yin Xiuzhen lives and works in China’s capital, a center of extreme change. The artist is confronted with the transformation of her city on a daily basis. In her installations, she creates landscapes of memories and absorbs her own personal memories into them like into an archive.