Life is like a journey whose destination we know from the start, but the time of arrival remains uncertain,’ Yin Xiuzhen tells me via written interview. It is a movement from birth to death that connects us all, consciously or otherwise. That commonality has fueled the artist’s multimedia interrogation of the individual, local, collective, and global human experience for over three decades. Take the Portable Cities series (2001-): described as personal portraits of places she has visited, these three-dimensional impressions of cities are assembled from clothing belonging to some of the location’s inhabitants, contained in open suitcases. A number of these cityscapes appear on a conveyor belt in the artist’s first major UK survey at London’s Hayward Gallery, recalling the airport baggage carousels that inspired the project. Among them is Portable City: Shenzhen (2003), whose crane-dotted skyline, capturing this Pearl River Delta city under construction some 23 years ago, now functions like a snapshot of a region on the rise. 

Portable City: London (2025) is the newest addition to the series – number 46, to be exact. It depicts the Prime Meridian with a T‑shirt featuring the iconic photograph of The Beatles crossing Abbey Road: ‘a crossing not of a street, but of time itself,’ Yin points out. Composed of 180 garments donated by Southbank Centre staff, this is one of two commissions created for the artist’s Hayward survey, curated by Yung Ma, which highlights Yin’s enduring relationship with the clothes people wear. The second commission, A Heart to Heart (2025), after which the exhibition is named, extends from the artist’s Cavity series (2008-): monumental tent-like structures shaped like human organs covered in a patchwork of pre-owned fabrics that audiences are invited to enter, as with the giant pink womb, Introspective Cavity (2008).

Yin describes A Heart to Heart as the anchor of her survey. Next to the heart-shaped structure is a wall covered with mirrors, the purpose of which is to reflect two simultaneous states: the real and the projected. ‘When we step inside the “solid” heart, the space is empty – we cannot see the full form of the “mirage” heart,’ Yin explains. ‘Only when we step outside do we see both hearts together, coexisting in quiet dialogue.’ This duality, which connects to the subjective and objective dynamics that shape human relations, aligns with the concept of xin, 心, the character for heart. That philosophy, as Yung Ma explains by email, ‘incorporates the logical brain and emotional heart as a single integrative concept.’ Which is to say, the heart is capable of both feeling what is real and what is perceived.

Yin elaborates further: ‘In Chinese culture, the concept of xin carries profound weight, going far beyond a physical organ. It is a philosophical and ontological concept synthesizing emotion, thought, consciousness, and morality in traditional Chinese culture, philosophy, and everyday life.’ To open the heart, is to open the mind, which in turn relates to how two hearts might connect. ‘In this sense, the work reveals the unique role of xin in Chinese culture,’ the artist explains. ‘It is both a bridge between people and a means of deepening understanding and knowledge.’

Beyond justified criticisms of this being a shallow trend, the current Chinamaxxxing wave online – whereby people in the Western world are going beyond geopolitical reductions and connecting with Chinese culture on a human level – could be understood as a manifestation of xin energy. This move towards understanding may explain why Ma describes Yin’s London survey as long overdue. For decades, Yin has been building bridges across cultures through her practice by embracing existence as an inherently shared phenomenon. Consider Portable City: Dunhuang (2010), which makes an appearance in ‘Heart to Heart’. Composed almost entirely of monochromatic earthen tones, the work pays homage to an ancient multicultural crossroads on the Silk Road, located in present-day Gansu province. Highlighting a history of globalization that decenters Western modernity, the work creates a continuum with the earlier International Flight (2002), a giant airplane covered with a skin of used clothing that hangs over the gallery. The underlying message is clear: Humans have always been on the move.

‘I particularly admire Yin’s courage in positioning her own personal narratives and histories against the backdrop of a rapidly moving world, often resulting in unconventional and inventive forms,’ says Ma. In the case of Collective Subconscious (2007), which Yin describes as ‘an elongated van carrying the layered experiences of four hundred individuals,’ a bisected 1990s Beijing minibus is linked by a 14-meter-long tunnel made from clothing belonging to Yin’s friends and family.

‘The use of worn clothing as the material is an act of imbuing “objects” with life,’ explains the artist, who grew up amid the Cultural Revolution in proximity to Beijing’s National Textile Cotton Mills where her mother was employed. ‘In my early works, I used clothes I had worn from childhood through adulthood – each piece carried deep, personal memories.’

Still, while memory is a potent subject for the artist, so is the inevitability of transformation. ‘Change is constant. Shifts in understanding and knowledge lead to shifts in practice,’ Yin points out. ‘I’ve always been on a path of experimentation – there is no success or failure, only what unfolds.’ For Ruined City (1996), Yin coated Chinese furniture and clay roof tiles with dry cement powder, drawing on the demolitions and constructions taking place across a turn-of-the-millennium China in flux. One year earlier, she staged Washing River in Chengdu, inviting passersby on the banks of a contaminated river to ‘wash’ ice bricks made from its water. Some two decades later, Yin presented Trojan (2016-2017) at the 58th Venice Biennale – a colossal textile sculpture of a woman adopting the emergency brace position on an airplane: a response to the disaster capitalism of contemporary globalization and its impact on everyday lives.

‘Growing up in a time of material scarcity, a new garment was a rare event, something that often only happened around the New Year. That scarcity taught us to treasure things,’ says Yin. ‘Today, in an age of consumerism and abundance, we have more clothes than ever, yet few hold lasting memories. These two very different realities reflect the shifts brought by time.’ That tension between past and present, here and there, highlights the artist’s relationship to the materials she uses to synthesize experiences and observations. The resulting forms invite audiences to join her in contemplating a world to which everyone ultimately belongs, recalling Beijing Opera (2001), an installation of blown-up images showing people in Beijing passing time together in public space on stools not unlike those arranged within the installation – an invitation to commune with those around you.

Of course, community can be messy and complex, and Yin transmutes that reality into artworks that hold space for civil society – an assemblage of individuals that do not always align – regardless. ‘I’ve always been drawn to materials that exist in tension with one another: cement and clothing, cement and butter, fruit and glass. Their interactions under heat, the forces generated during firing, the stress released in [the heat treatment process of] annealing – all of this becomes the language of the work,’ Yin says. ‘I’ve also long been interested in bringing together materials that aren’t supposed to meet – the combination that is in some circumstances a taboo. I love to observe the invisible “force of contention” between them.’ This embrace of difference is at the heart of Yin’s work: a transformation of connection into practice.