How Did an Artist Fit a WHOLE CITY Into a Suitcase?

Why It Matters

Yin’s work reframes personal and collective memory as portable architecture, influencing contemporary art’s dialogue on identity, migration, and urban transformation.

Key Takeaways

• Yin uses collected garments as “second skin” for memory
• Portable city suitcases embed iconic landmarks and local soundscapes
• Installations like “Heart to Heart” create immersive reflective spaces
• “The Ruined City” links cement, clothing, and urban transformation
• Exhibitions reveal Yin’s blend of hard materials with personal narratives

Summary

The video profiles Chinese‑born artist Yin, whose latest exhibition showcases her signature “portable city” suitcases and large‑scale immersive installations. Each suitcase functions as a miniature, travel‑ready metropolis, packed with iconic landmarks, collected garments, and even recorded street sounds, turning personal memory into a tangible urban map.

Yin’s practice hinges on the idea of clothing as a “second skin” that carries individual identity. By stitching together garments from strangers and her own life, she creates collective memory capsules that sit inside hard‑finished cases—often cement or metal—highlighting the tension between softness and durability. The London suitcase, for example, features the London Eye, Parliament and a soundscape of bustling streets, while the “Heart to Heart” installation uses mirrored walls to evoke a church‑like sanctuary for introspection.

Notable moments include the 1995 work “The Ruined City,” where Yin sealed childhood clothes in a cement chest, symbolising how cement builds cities while clothing builds people. She describes cement as the material of urban growth and garments as the fabric of personal history, turning the piece into a ritualistic time capsule. The exhibition also revisits her “Cavity” series—organ‑shaped rooms that invite visitors to physically enter the artwork and confront their inner dialogues.

Yin’s oeuvre interrogates how we carry our histories, identities, and the ever‑shifting urban landscape within portable, tactile objects. By merging personal artifacts with architectural motifs, she offers a fresh lens on globalization, migration, and the mutable nature of place, prompting audiences to reconsider the materiality of memory in a rapidly changing world.

Original Description

Senior Curator Yung Ma and choreographer and dance artist Julia Cheng invite you to see the familiar in new ways, in this tour of Yin Xiuzhen’s Hayward Gallery exhibition, Heart to Heart.

Yung and Cheng begin with what is perhaps the artist’s best known series, Portable Cities; a collection of material city-scape sculptures housed in suitcases. Each suitcase city represents a different place the artist has been, with a new one depicting her interpretation of London created specifically for this exhibition. Yung explains that ‘to Yin, suitcases are like mini homes that we carry with us wherever we go and our identities and our memories are all contained in this object.’

From there the pair move on to ‘A Heart to Heart’ (2025), the latest in a series of large installations made from steel frames and used clothes which represent human organs. Second-hand clothes are a material which Yin uses regularly in her work as she considers clothing to be a ‘second skin’ – that what we wear carries the essence of who we are.

Though Yin is known for her soft sculpture, this exhibition demonstrates that her practice is actually quite expansive, ‘A Heart to Heart’ explores the tensions between very hard and very soft materials, while ‘Ruined City’ (1996), which is being shown here for only the second ever time, is an installation of cement powder, furniture and roof tiles.

As part of this mini tour Yung and Cheng also take a look at the earliest work in the exhibition, the almost ritualistic sculpture and video piece, ‘Dress Box’ (1995). ‘There are so many different ways of interacting with her art,’ says Cheng as she reflects on Yin’s work.

See Yin Xiuzhen: Heart to Heart at the Hayward Gallery until Sunday 3 May, 2026.

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