Metropolitan Museum of Art Announces Fifth Avenue Renovation Plans

February 8, 2012 – 8:17 am |

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has unveiled plans for a comprehensive redesign of the four-block-long outdoor plaza that runs in front of its landmark Fifth Avenue façade, from 80th to 84th Streets in Manhattan. Rendering showing bird’s-eye view of proposed Fifth Avenue plaza redesign (image: OLIN) The plan also calls for the creation of new fountains—to replace the deteriorating ones that have been in use since they were built in the 1970s along with the existing plaza. The fountains will be ... Read More

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Projects 92: Yin Xiuzhen Large-Scale Sculpture Collective Subconscious Opens at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

February 24, 2010 – 11:21 amNo Comment

NEW YORK,- The Museum of Modern Art presents Projects 92: Yin Xiuzhen, the first U.S. installation of the artist’s large-scale sculpture Collective Subconscious (2007), February 24 through March 24, 2010.

Yin Xiuzhen’s (Chinese, b. 1963) site-specific installations and sculptures bridge the past and the present, the environmental and the personal. Collective Subconscious is a 38-foot-long minivan that has been bisected and lengthened via a tube covered in a patchwork of secondhand garments and set upon rows of tiny wheels. A limited number of Museum visitors at a time are welcome to climb inside the caterpillar-like sculpture, where low stools provide seating and the strains of the popular Chinese pop song “Beijing Beijing” (2007) by Wang Feng fill the air, creating a refuge within the white walls of the gallery and a place for conversation and discussion. Projects 92 is organized by Sarah Suzuki, The Sue and Eugene Mercy, Jr., Assistant Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books, The Museum of Modern Art. The Elaine Dannheisser Projects series is coordinated by Kathy Halbreich, Associate Director, The Museum of Modern Art.

Yin often employs quotidian materials in her work, frequently including found and repurposed textiles. Collective Subconscious incorporates used clothing taken from friends, family, and strangers. For the artist, these worn garments have the power to evoke memory, retain human experience, and convey time and place. In previous works, she has used conveyances from airplane fuselages to tractors; for this sculpture, she uses a Songhuajiang minivan. In the years before private car ownership became common in China, this type of minivan, known in Chinese as xiao mian (“little loaf of bread”), was used as a communal taxi and represented economic success for those who could afford to hail—or own—one. The work reflects the rapid social and environmental change in urban China, as communal vehicles have given way to private car ownership, and shared communist ideals have been eclipsed by individual material success.

Yin Xiuzhen, who lives and works in Beijing, trained as a painter during the rise of the artistic avant-garde in China in the mid-1980s. In the early 1990s, she shifted her practice to focus primarily on site-specific installations and sculpture. Her work has been shown internationally at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt, Germany (2009); 7th Shanghai Biennial, Shanghai, (2008); Venice Biennale, Venice (2007); Brooklyn Museum, New York (2007); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2005); Today Art Museum, Beijing (2005); 26th Sao Paulo Biennial, Sao Paulo (2004); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2003); and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (1998).

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