The Fabrication of Power Yin Xiuzhen’s visual ‘Weapon’ against the Chinese Communist Party Rosie Home
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Rosie Home T H E FA B R I C AT I O N OF POWER
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Regional ARTicultion Competitor.
2021
When you walk into the room in the Tate Modern displaying Yin Xiuzhen’s ‘Weapon’, you find yourself immersed among a fleet of 30 colourful fabric-covered sculptures suspended from the ceiling at varying heights and positions. This large installation piece is inspired by the cultural and political issues that Yin experienced during her impoverished childhood in Beijing, China, specifically during the time of the Cultural Revolution. This was a traumatic and chaotic time for the Chinese population that left a permanent mark on both the people and Chinese culture as a whole. Through this piece of art, along with a whole host of others, Yin aims to bring awareness to this widely forgotten - yet crucially important – piece of history.
shape of the objects also very closely resembles that of the Beijing Central Radio and Television Tower. This is a 405 metre tall telecommunications tower found in Beijing’s Haidian District, and one of China’s most well known broadcasting towers. Yin’s choice to use its shape in this artwork represents China’s broadcast media as a whole, and the dual interpretation of the sculptures is meant to interlink the concept of the missiles and the TV tower, suggesting that both are equally dangerous weapons – both supposedly providing a means to defeat a hypothetical enemy, and massive tools in conflict. Yin is presenting the idea of the Chinese governments control, over their own population and other nations – both with the physical threat of harm and violence, and the less noticeable, implicit control the government has through technology and the media. This introduces the concept of ‘Hard Power vs. Soft Power’.
‘There is an immediately threatening atmosphere to the work’
The objects are made from second-hand garments of clothing, stretched over a frame of extendable curtain rods and metal hoops, with a small kitchen knife visibly protruding out of the front. The viewer’s first instinct would be perhaps to liken the objects to missiles, based on both the piece’s title, and the way in which the objects are assembled. This is one intended interpretation, but one can notice that the 8
Joseph Nye, the political scientist who coined these terms, defined ‘power’ as the ability to influence and control the
