Chinese Name: 尹子潔
Born: 1990
Place of Birth: Taoyuan City (Northern Taiwan)
Did You Know?
For Yin Zi-jie, art is a way that can lead people to temporarily escape from reality. However, this escape is not into unreality, but rather opens a small gap in reality, allowing people to glimpse a different perspective.
Yin Zi-jie graduated from the Department of Art and Design at Yuan Ze University (元智大學) and obtained a master's degree in Fine Arts from National Tainan University of the Arts in 2017. She is skilled in using various media, such as wood, iron sculpture, leather, photography, and video, to express her artistic vision. Using relational aesthetics as a context, Yin attempts to reduce the subjectivity of the artist in her creations, blending the relationships between the venue, the artwork, and the audience, creating a social environment in which viewers gather together to participate and experience.
In 2014, Yin Zi-jie's work "Water Chestnut Project (菱角計畫)" reflected on and reinterpreted the term "exhibition" in a contemporary way through the artist’s thinking. Bringing art into life or discovering art from life seems to have become one of the hottest topics in Taiwanese art exhibitions in recent years. "Water Chestnut Project" mainly uses the exhibition form as the core theme. Through her real-life experiences, Yin developed two identities, those of curator and resident artist, to explore the positional relationship between curators, resident artists, and amateur artists under the exhibition system and the reality of contemporary art mechanisms.
In 2021, Yin's "Blank Man (空白之人)" saw her hire a temporary sign holder to hold a blank sign at the usual location of the sign holder’s work. She filmed the situation, choosing a camera angle similar to that of a dashcam, creating a sense of "something is about to happen" but seemingly nothing does. In this information-saturated era, "viewing" has become more akin to scanning, and when the audience sees a person holding a blank sign, the artist hopes that this blank space will create a different kind of viewing experience that feeds into daily life, allowing the audience to feel its powerless appeal.
In the fall of 2021, Yin Zi-jie was selected for the Matsu Art Residency Project at the National Hsinchu Living Arts Museum. During her two-month residency, she gradually immersed herself in the life of Matsu and established friendships with local residents. At the same time, she used the perspective of a pure and unbiased artist to observe this outlying island from the outside, attempting to overturn the existing perception of Matsu through her unique "conceptual art."
"Message in a Bottle (瓶中信)" is one of Yin's works from Matsu, combining local ecological characteristics with the artist's personal reflections. As a form of message delivery, when messages and emotions are sealed and drifting at sea, people cannot predict their final destination. However, in today's technologically advanced world, people can increasingly predict their trajectory and even track them with GPS. In this state where the romance almost no longer exists, Yin Zi-jie attempts to evoke the old-fashioned sentiment of a message in a bottle.
She turned the local Matsu Daily into pulp and mixed it with river tamarind seeds to make paper. River tamarind was introduced to the island when Matsu was eager to reforest, but it caused ecological threats due to the lack of natural enemies. Yin Zi-jie brought the paper to the exhibition and invited viewers to write a letter. At the end of the exhibition, the artist recited the letters on the spot and put them in a drifting bottle. Since there was no deliberate tracking, we do not know whether the message in the bottle was eventually opened and read or drifted to another island, growing into another river tamarind.
Yin Zi-jie's 2021 work "How to Get Balance (如何達到平衡)" was inspired by her residencies in Hualien and Taitung. She saw some three-legged dogs on the road and later learned that indigenous people had to place traps to prevent crop damage, causing some dogs to be injured or even lose a leg. Yin transformed this real-life experience in Hualien and Taitung into symbolic elements; in the exhibition, a three-legged table was placed against the wall, and viewers realized that the three-legged table and the injured three-legged dog were referring to one another. This artwork won recognition in the form of the 2022 Austronesian International Arts Award (南島國際美術獎).
(Photo courtesy of Yin Zi-jie)