For Chinese artists reaching a certain maturity, an innate, latent gene awakens: the longing for "monumentality."

Grand spectacles, massive productions, and colossal scales seem to signal career success—after all, realizing such visions demands equally vast resources and capital. Beyond the tangible satisfaction of material achievement, a spiritual legacy lingers in the blood of Chinese artists, inherited from Xu Beihong’s large-scale historical themes: a sense of historical duty to "use literature to convey truth," the creative instinct to merge personal fate with the tides of the times, and a god’s-eye view of human folly. While this aligns seamlessly with Confucian intellectual responsibility, its collectivist and didactic undertones starkly contradict contemporary art’s core ethos. This tension isn’t just a clash between individual and collective; it speaks to how artists might transcend modernist methods to truly enter the contemporary discourse, how inner density might grow alongside outward expansion. These reflections arose as I viewed Yin Xiuzhen’s solo exhibition Piercing the Sky.

For a leading Chinese artist like Yin, staging a major show at an institution like Shanghai’s Power Station of Art (PSA) at the peak of her career is pivotal. Here, she presents her most current work in monumental form—yet this very scale lays bare artistic vulnerabilities, impossible to hide. Through Yin’s case, we glimpse the real challenges facing today’s Chinese "successful" artists.

Size isn’t merely a visible disparity in physical form; it’s the dialectic between macro and micro, abstract and concrete, distance and immediacy. Before monumentality seduces an artist, true creation begins with pinpointing one’s own "smallness"—the precise expression of subtle sensations as a foundational path. Yin once excelled at this: her early works throbbed with acute sensitivity to lived trauma. In the 1990s, she collected furniture and dust from demolition sites, silently arranging them into Ruined Capital; she embedded worn shoes in cement to form relic-like Road; cloth shoes fused with photographs in Yin Xiuzhen echoed this elegiac tone. These works fixated on obscured, erased memories—not as nostalgia, but as a visceral response to the era’s breakneck development. While others raced forward, Yin’s "bodily awareness" sensed not renewal, but a hollowing-out. Thus, she anchored lives in cement, made them tangible through shoe soles.

Whether resisting power’s erasures or offering second-skin solace, Yin’s genius lay in sensing "what life endures." Early on, this sensitivity carved narrow gateways for expression: hand-poured cement, meticulous stitching, quiet collections—each a simple (unadorned) act squeezing raw life through constrained apertures. That painful sincerity moved viewers. Yet thirty years later, in PSA’s cavernous space, those early constraints vanish. Faced with the lure of filling vastness, sensitivity shifts from an asset to an obstacle. Let’s return to Piercing the Sky to see what unfolds when "scaling up" becomes the challenge.

Monumentality manifests two ways: singular enormity (like the titular Piercing the Sky) or cumulative multiplicity (e.g., Journey of Thoughts and 1,080 Breaths at PSA). Chinese artists instinctively handle "multitude"—think Xu Bing carving 4,000 pseudo-characters, Qiu Zhijie rewriting the Orchid Pavilion Preface into oblivion, or Li Xianting defining "Beads and Brushstrokes" as endless, prayer-bead-like repetition. This "multitude" isn’t about outcome but process—a life-driven compulsion: the unstoppable repetition of redemption. Only through repetition can emotions settle, confessions flow, strength release.

Pursuing monumentality often lures artists into theatricality.

Walking through the exhibition feels like traversing stages: Aircraft, Piercing the Sky, and Mending the Sky form a triptych of agrarian-to-modern alienation and ambition; Sound Tower visualizes audio waves; Tunnel compresses daily survival; Drool suspends online vitriol as symbol... These recent works share a method: stitching metaphors into "meaning theaters." Plots pivot between conflict, calm, and mystery. Yet for all its dazzle, this theater remains trapped in modernity’s permutations, never reaching contemporaneity’s core. Why?

Even brilliant metaphors aren’t summaries. Metaphors are replaceable surface; summaries are evolutionary acts probing essence. This distinction—"surface variation" vs. "essence excavation"—separates modernity from contemporaneity. As Arthur Danto wrote, modernity "uses a discipline’s own methods to critique it without subversion," while contemporaneity’s task is subversion—to smash constraints and "connect art directly to life." This also distinguishes performance art (unframed summaries of lived experience) from performing art (framed representations). Michael Fried critiqued theatricality in Art and Objecthood, calling theater "art’s negation" for its designed "situations" and cross-disciplinary spectacles. True art seeks presentness: "a single instant suffices to see everything, to experience its full depth and completeness, to be forever convinced... It is their presentness and instantaneousness that defeats theater."

Final question: Can artists shape "monumentality"? How does it truly succeed?

Not all bigness aims for results—only when necessity demands it. There are several typical examples: First, shaping life itself in grand actions. For instance, in the final work of Abramovich and Ulay, "Lover: The Great Wall", the long and arduous trek along the Great Wall was regarded as a ritual to advance the development of life. The core of the Christo couple's wrapping behavior is ambition. Whether it is the Parliament building symbolizing political power or the canyon coast representing the power of nature, the more grand the object wrapped, the more it highlights the ambition of the will to live. Second, explore the hidden attributes of the "big" itself. As Richard Serra spent his entire life studying the gravity of steel, he sketched the elegant boundaries of energy movement within the immense weight. The third and most challenging necessity comes from the "great without outer" that corresponds to "small without inner". This is the natural coexistence of the hidden and the grand, and it is the infinite pattern that naturally emerges when an individual's depth and sensitivity are pushed to the limit. And this is, in my opinion, the most suitable path for Yin Xiuzhen to achieve "greatness".

Yin’s sensitivity is undeniable—a gift for shared empathy. A decade ago, Tear Vessel (skin-contoured to catch a tear) moved me deeply. Such empathy bridges trauma universally. But sensitivity’s flaw is diffuseness; it reacts to everything. Yin’s works constantly respond: Gaze Wall uses microscopic eye reflections to refract reality; Unknown and Lost Deer dissect technology’s grip on life. Yet identifying issues is just the start. If sensitivity merely discovers and cleverly metaphors, the distilled spectacle may intrigue but not stir—becoming cleverness, not lived truth.

Extending artistic elements is grueling. Unnecessary surface iterations deplete value; meaningful continuity explores constraints—using, questioning, even returning to an element’s intrinsic infinity. This demands relentless sensitivity to truth. In an era of novelty, art’s task isn’t invention. Only by rooting in origins, refining amid temptations, can artists re-enter the "inward infinite" and construct a "boundless" spiritual home.

We’ve lived through ambitious times. Post-striving inertia still drives us to fill grand molds—until the hollowness of falsity collapses under its own weight. Perhaps this is the pivotal turn: flashy shells no longer suffice. It’s time to return—to beginnings, to the present—before our sensitivity to truth numbs completely.