Grief takes many forms. Chinese artist Yin Xiuzhen mourns by preserving, stitching, sewing. Working in 1990s Beijing, she saw a city transforming so fast, and casting off its history with so little ceremony, that she had to save it somehow. Her show at the Hayward is full of scraps of the past, piled up, splayed out and knitted together in a desperate attempt to slow the onslaught of modernisation.
Obviously, it didn’t work, Beijing is as modernised as cities come, but the works within her show, Heart to Heart, are a knowingly futile gesture. A little wooden trunk, built by the artist’s father, is filled with a neat stack of her old clothes, all encased in concrete. The soft warmth of her personal past preserved in the cold brutality of composite, the material irrevocably transforming her city and her life. Nearby, traditional roof tiles are scattered on the floor around an old Chinese cupboard, all covered in a thick, filthy layer of cement powder. Everywhere you look, the past is being buried to make way for the future.
