Artist Statement

Sitong Yin is primarily a fiber artist, she works around fiber & textile, installations, and performance. Her work explores translations between materials, places, and cultures, and the poetic and spiritual moments revealed in the gaps of translations.
Yin takes images of nature like landscapes and rocks, and translating them into weavings, embroidery, paper, etc. By manipulating materials, craft technologies like jacquard weavings, digital embroidery, and papermaking and constantly evidencing the interplay between nature and materials, Yin is in search in the materiality of objects, of a state of existence, exist without being present, exist within in-betweenness. Imitation and use of natural materials and textures are the ways to build up a space for poetic wandering in her works, to examine a kind of nostalgia toward emptiness. This nostalgia responds to the loss of home and landscape in the context of environmental and cultural migration. Yin draws inspiration from Chinese ancient philosophies, art, and poetry for the methodologies of examining emptiness and meaninglessness and explore how they are translated into and respond to contemporary context.
Yin’s work also responds to philosophical contemplation on the passage of space, time, and life & death. Her grandfather was a tailor, he died 30 days before she was born. She is currently the only textile worker left in her family. In between her grandfather’s life and hers, what and how is it translated?