This thesis examines the circumstances of production and layers of meaning in the installation works of Beijing-based contemporary artist Yin Xiuzhen (b. 1963, Beijing). The approach is to analyze several groups of Yin Xiuzhen's installations to read how the artist has chosen to map the transformations of the economy, culture, built environment, and power structures, first of her native Beijing and then concentrically outward into the global arena. The result will chronicle the journey of the artist's successful negotiation of place, space, materials, and message: what I call mapping the fabric of life.
As an academically trained oil painter, the 1989 graduate of Capitol Normal University in Beijing initially had limited opportunities to explore a new creative path in art production. During the 1990s, she emerged along with other experimental artists in China who worked to create conceptual art. This thesis focuses on the choices both taken and resisted by Yin Xiuzhen as she developed her artistic voice and located her message within homegrown installations, using as materials fragments and remnants of lives and places. Yin Xiuzhen's negotiation of the dignity, place, and space of ordinary people and their traditions, set against the overwhelming backdrop of destabilizing urbanization and depersonalizing market forces, gives voice to the powerless in the chorus of hard-won social discourse in China today.