How I create... with visual artist Yin Xiuzhen

Yin Xiuzhen is an artist known for her immersive installations and sculptures, many of which are made from secondhand items, particularly clothing.

Born and raised in Beijing, Yin’s work often considers the space between individual memory and cultural identity in our increasingly globalised societies. Some of her earlier works such as Dress Box (1995) and Ruined City (1996) featured alongside new commissions in our 2026 Hayward Gallery exhibition, Yin Xiuzhen: Heart to Heart.

Alongside this first major UK survey of her work, the artist kindly gave us this insight into her creative process.

​​When and where do you find yourself at your most creative?

Everyone has their own kind of creativity. For me, it feels like a seed hidden somewhere inside the body. It waits for the right moment to sprout. Thinking is its nutrient solution, but when it will finally burst into life is impossible to predict. The spark might come from a conversation, a passage of text, a gust of wind, a flash of colour, or even a smell. It has little to do with a specific place. What matters more is the intensity of what enters the mind – the tension of input – which can suddenly break the stillness of a quiet moment.

How do you know when an idea is worth developing into something more?

Some ideas stay inside me for years before I ever act on them. Some suffocate and disappear; others remain. As time passes and circumstances change, the ideas I can’t quite let go of continue to resurface. Each time they return, they gather new reflections and are stored away again. I believe that the ideas you cannot abandon are the ones you truly want to pursue at your core.

Which tools are key to your creative process?

The most important tool is that which helps you discover new tools.

Who are you creating your work for, and how free are you to create the work you want to create?

Usually there isn’t a specific audience in mind. I feel that the work is first made for myself – it’s a form of self-expression. At the same time it is made for an imagined interlocutor, someone with whom a dialogue might take place. Freedom and constraint always exist together.

How do you stay disciplined, and dedicated to your work?

I try to keep my thinking active, always open to discovering new possibilities. In daily life though, I find it difficult to maintain a strict routine. The body tends to tell you when it’s time to work. Interest is what allows me to enter a fully absorbed creative state – filtering out the trivialities of everyday life so that my attention can gather around what I’m doing in that moment.

What do you do when you hit a wall; when you feel unmotivated or uninspired? How do you overcome this?

When I hit a wall or run out of ideas, I try not to force it. I make sure I get enough sleep, go out for walks, and expose myself to unfamiliar fields. I also read books that are unrelated to what I’m doing – small, leisurely reading that allows the mind to relax.

Who do you look to for feedback?

I don’t deliberately seek external feedback. Everyone has their own spiritual energy. Learning to maintain your own energy is not the same as being stubborn or conservative.

How different is your creative process now to when you first began as an artist?

My creative process has changed enormously since the early days. At that time, making art happened in the margins of my life – for ten years I was teaching, so art was essentially a hobby pursued after work. I had no studio, no financial support, and no opportunities to exhibit (many of the works I made outdoors were left behind or discarded once they were finished). But what I did have was the desire to create.

Today the conditions for making art are far better than they were then. What reassures me most is that the passion and drive for creating have never faded. Alongside the intuitive sensibility that has always guided me, there is now more rational judgment than there was in the beginning.

What does success feel like?

I’ve never really felt what people call ‘success’. That’s a word others use. Perhaps I’ve always held myself to a high standard. When I was in school, classmates would feel happy scoring 80 out of 100, while I would only think about the missing 20 points. Looking back, that mindset seems rather foolish to me now. A high score doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Getting 100 matters less and less to me. What matters more is living a life with clarity – seeing things through and understanding them. Only then does life feel truly worthwhile.

Is there a piece of advice you’ve received that you often find yourself returning to?

Many years ago I wrote down a sentence on a piece of paper and taped it to my cabinet, where it stayed for years. Over time those words slowly seeped into my bloodstream, and at some point the paper itself drifted away without me noticing.

In recent years, the guiding idea in my mind has no longer been a single sentence, but a principle: the balance between Occam’s razor and multiple perspectives.

What’s the most recent thing you learned about yourself through your work?

One moment came in late 2024, during my solo exhibition, Piercing the Sky, at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai. In recent years I have been constantly occupied with making work, spending less time with my parents and family. I call them often, but that is never the same as being together in person. Taking the exhibition at PSA as an opportunity, I invited my parents and relatives to my studio and asked them to be part of the performance, one by one, for Exit [a work, which features repurposed Exit signs alongside videos of people walking on treadmills placed in an entranceway].

Our whole family was present, four generations together. My parents were in their eighties and nineties, and the youngest child was still in kindergarten. Everyone was searching for an ‘exit’ together. My mother was extremely happy. It felt as if she had rediscovered a sense of meaning in life. Half a year later she passed away. What remains are precious documents of that moment, and for me it became a reason to reflect again on life.

Another example is Portable Cities: London, which features in this exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. I have been working on this series for more than twenty years, during which time the method has changed – from simplicity to complexity in the past, and now from complexity back to simplicity. There is a saying by the Song dynasty Zen master Qingyuan Weixin (青原惟信). At first, ‘mountains are mountains, waters are waters’. Then ‘mountains are not mountains, waters are not waters’. Finally, ‘mountains are really mountains, waters are really waters’. Using used clothes worn by people in this city, I did not make a model of the city, nor a miniature landscape. What I made is my understanding of the city, and my understanding of the world. It is a record of walking and traveling.

How do you know when you’re done?

It’s actually difficult to say. When it feels right, it’s right. For example, in A Heart to Heart, which I made for the Hayward Gallery exhibition, the sculpture’s metal structures were originally wrapped in clothing. After finishing it, something still felt wrong, though I couldn’t explain why. Later I removed some of the clothing that wrapped the ‘vascular’ sections so that parts of the metal structure became visible. At that moment it suddenly felt correct. Of course, others might think the work looks unfinished.