ABSTRACT
In 2004, Yin Xiuzhen showed her Portable Cities project in the exhibition Concrete Horizons: Contemporary Art from China, held at the Adam Art Gallery in Wellington, New Zealand. Portable Cities is a mutable artwork consisting of variable numbers of ‘suitcase cityscapes’, each fabricated from used clothing, found objects and maps taken from a particular urban centre. Between 2000 and 2004, these cityscapes were installed in differing configurations, usually in combination with local sound recordings, in galleries and exhibition spaces throughout the world. The suitcase cityscapes installed in each show varied, but the roll call of cities mapped by the project as a whole reads like a list of the metropolitan centres that rose to international artworld prominence during the 1990s – Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Lhasa, Singapore, Lisbon, Berlin, Sydney, Vancouver, San Francisco, Minneapolis – and to these were added, in Yin’s work, well-established centres such as New York and Paris. This obvious ‘name check’ demonstrates more than Yin’s extraordinary
success as an individual artist,1 it signals the accelerated international profile of contemporary art from China in the years following the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square and the country’s subsequent ‘open’ cultural policy and engagement with global trade networks. Chinese art is, arguably, the art market success story of the past 15 years – indeed, Charles Saatchi’s recent
decision to focus his new gallery around a collection of contemporary art from China is clear confirmation of the market dominance of the work.2 Similarly, China itself, in terms of the global marketplace, is a tiger rising from its rest; the massive infrastructural work being undertaken in Beijing, Shanghai and other metropolitan centres is but a small measure of the changes being wrought to the country as a whole as it becomes a truly global economic force. Portable Cities can lend itself almost too readily to these dual frameworks,
attesting to the art market’s ability to make international superstars of young artists from China, who spend their time travelling from one biennale to another, their works and lives packed into suitcases and carried on long-haul flights. The world-traveller contemporary Chinese artist tirelessly reproduces the cities she sees, each becoming more like the other, more an interchangeable image packed in a case than a lived space, as the pace of globalisation irons out the last individual wrinkles left to suggest that cultural difference might be anything more than the consumable pleasure of the exotic. I would contest this rather obvious, clichéd reading of Portable Cities,
however, and, indeed, criticism of Yin’s work that simply locates her as an ‘authentic’ Chinese woman artist longing for the return of her home, Beijing, to an imaginary past beyond the reach of change or the introduction of ‘foreign’
influences. By contrast, I would argue that Portable Cities demonstrates, materially, how a contemporary woman artist from Beijing makes herself ‘at home everywhere’. The urban skylines of Portable Cities are, literally, supported by suitcases
[colour plate 4]. In this sense, the works convey immediately an important paradox: the cities’ iconic profiles can be identified by seemingly fixed symbols (the Golden Gate Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, etc.), yet their foundation, the ground on which they rest, is quintessentially mobile and dynamic, produced as it is from well-travelled luggage. There is a fascinating parallel between this paradox, one that I would argue is central to Portable Cities, and the insights of geographers such as Saskia Sassen, who have sought to understand the significance of metropolitan centres to the phenomenon of globalisation. As Sassen has argued, the inter-state system that dominated world-wide exchange over the past three centuries has now given way to a transnational economy that operates through key metropolitan sites. These metropoles simultaneously centralise resources (producing ostensibly stable urban points) and increase dispersal, fluidity and movement by facilitating and extending transnational interchange.3
