Yin Xiuzhen’s Portable Cities

Abstract This article examines Yin Xiuzhen’s Portable Cities created since 2001. A range of miniature cities, constructed from restitched washed worn clothes, rise from unfolded suitcases. The discussion draws on Iris Marion Young’s conception of preservation—an important, but often overlooked dimension of care and cultivation in the formation of home and one’s sense of belonging. It investigates how Yin’s artistic practice of domestic preservation might make and remake oneself ‘at home’ in an ever-shifting urbanising and globalising world, bringing to the fore an iterative temporality of embodied inhabitation. Built upon recent feminist debates about affective labour, this article casts new light on women’s relation to home and domesticity and women’s status and contribution in the current stage of neoliberalism. It considers how Yin’s works might challenge normative accounts of social advancement, global capitalism and international migration which often push women aside, forging interpersonal intersubjective connections across cultural and geographical boundaries.