Hu Yinping: Weaving Realities

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Ming Contemporary Art Museum is proud to present Weaving Realities, a solo exhibition of artist Hu Yinping. It is the artist’s first institutional solo. Hu Yinping was born in Sichuan. She establishes and weaves social networks through fabricating and transforming events, characters, and personas while enabling innate human agency. Her work often responds to her immediate reality in a witty and vibrant tone.

Weaving Realities will present “Xiao Fang,” a project of Hu’s that has been ongoing since 2015 and the debut of  “Qiao Xiaohuan,” the hidden figure behind the character “Xiao Fang.” “Xiao Fang” emerged from a discovery Hu made on a trip back to her hometown in rural Sichuan. The elderly women in town, including her mother, hand-wove traditional woolen hats, which they sold in bulk at a low price at the time. The artist then hired a friend to play a character named “Xiao Fang” and introduced her to her mother, Yin Sanjie. Xiao Fang was a conscientious and generous acquirer and bought Yin’s woven hat for a high price. The act built and nourished Yin’s confidence and the story began spreading through the network of weavers in town, and more and more elderly women started selling their hats to Xiao Fang over time. The white lie of “Xiao Fang” rolled on like a ball of wool, weaving together an entire community. The elderly women designed collections of woven objects based on their own living conditions and imaginations of the outside world: bikinis (the “Snow White Dove” stage), imaginary enemies and arms (the “Sense of Security” stage), urban household essentials, such as cars (the “Standard Configuration” stage), and so on. The social ecology of this rural town and the women’s private lives transformed drastically as a result.

“Xiao Fang” recalls women’s lives as factory workers in the 20th century and Hu’s upbringing among them. Hu Yinping plays the role of a mediator to liberate marginalized women from their traditional roles in repetitive rural and domestic labor and bestow upon them tools for imagination and aesthetic pursuit. At the same time, “Xiao Fang” further deepens and complicates “events fabrication” as a throughline in the artist’s practice. The figure behind this long-running scheme is Qiao Xiaohuan, a highly accomplished commercial artist and Hu’s alternate persona. The success of “Qiao Xiaohuan” in the art market patronizes Hu’s practice and the operation of “Xiao Fang.”

“Xiao Fang” and “Qiao Xiaohuan” are two of Hu Yingping’s fictional personas. Hu’s work travels fluidly between fiction and reality by fabricating events and connections and often results in a unique mode of production. Such ambiguity mirrors her own marginalized position in the art world. Who is to say the exhibition is not just another event in her fabrication?

Curator: Sam Shiyi Qian
Director: Qiu Zhijie
Producer: Li Songjian, Ling Feifei
Organizer: Ming Yuan Group, Ming Contemporary Art Museum
Sponsor by: Double Space
​Support by: BLACKHEAD, AA GLOBAL LTD