Ning-Hui Chung

Yin Xiuzhen (born 1963, Beijing) creates installations addressing globalization, memory, and identity. Using worn clothes and everyday materials, she sews and reconstructs personal experience into social reflection—transforming softness and fabric into poetic symbols of time, belonging, and change.

In Portable City, Yin builds miniature cityscapes inside suitcases using discarded clothes. Each soft, tactile “city” becomes a portable home, reflecting displacement, migration, and cultural fluidity. The tender materials humanize urban form, embodying warmth and identity amid globalization’s transience.

Yin Xiuzhen’s work positions material as a vessel of memory. By sewing with worn garments, she embeds traces of lived experience into fabric, aligning with Pierre Nora’s idea of lieux de mémoire—sites where memory resides when social continuity fades. Her methodology centers on sewing and layering, gestures of both femininity and repair, turning labor into ritual acts of restoration.

Theoretically, her Portable City series intertwines the private and public, resonating with Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection, where remnants of the body and culture are reabsorbed into aesthetic order. Softness becomes resistance; warmth becomes critique against the hardness of urban modernity.

For my own practice, Yin Xiuzhen teaches that memory can emerge through touch and texture rather than monumentality. In my miniature sculptures, I explore how handmade processes and structural delicacy can evoke emotional resonance—transforming material into an intimate architecture of remembrance and belonging.

#memory and identity #soft sculpture #mobility and belonging #material and emotion #poetic space #urban metaphor #domesticity #handcraft and intimacy

Image credit & website:

https://www.ignant.com/2014/05/07/portable-cities-by-yin-xiuzhen/

Written on: 28 September 2025