Yuz Museum is pleased to present “I Am Listening,” the first institutional solo exhibition of Shanghai-based artist YIN Yi, from April 27 to July 13, 2025 at Yuz Project Space of Art. From sound, video, installation, performance to auditory theater, the exhibition will present a series of sound art works by Yin Yi, who has shifted from his role as an avant-garde musician to the field of contemporary art, featuring his recent observation and research on sound in Shanghai and urban public spaces.
Yin Yi was born in Shanghai in 1978. He formed a band when he was twenty, and then turned to digital music and actively engaged in musical creation for various fields. At the age of thirty, he created his first work based on field recordings, initiating his artistic practice and expression in sound art. As an artist, musician, curator, and university lecturer, Yin has continuously focused on sound and the functional exploration of it within social structures.
Yin is a self-proclaimed “scavenger of city sound,” who keenly captures and collects fragments of sound from the encounters in daily life. After recording various social soundscapes from streets to roads, subways to parks, he gradually became aware of the underlying logic and mechanisms governing sound in public spaces, as well as the connections between sound in urban spaces and the cultural and social attributes of public spaces. Such observations led him to a series of works exploring “sound in public spaces,” while he also put forward the notion of “auditory – sound” as a way of thinking and body engagement, guiding audience to perceive the world through sound. For Yin, sound becomes a source of knowledge and listening becomes a method of cognition; in the works of this exhibition, these rational and abstract concepts, along with the broad implications of the term “urban space,” are restored and concretized to a specific place: Shanghai.
If this series of works are considered as research-based practice, then “Shanghai” is by no means merely Yin’s working field. Shanghai is his birthplace, his cultural background, and the very space of his daily life. In the works created in Shanghai or taking Shanghai as the context, such as20140901 - 20140930(2014),A Journey in Shanghai(2017/2025),Toward the West(2019),Shanghai(2021),From ____ to Xintiandi(2022), and etc., Yin is first and foremost a Shanghai citizen. Driven by a profound sense of place and “Topophilia,” he projects his self-awareness into specific practice and reflection. What he does, however, is not for collective narcissism or lyrical indulgence. Instead, he contemplates on how to position intellect and emotion, and how to construct critique and affect through art.
This exhibition features eight sound art works created between 2014 and 2025. They embody these keywords that are woven together by sound – “public space,” “urban imagery,” “body/gesture,” “micropolitics,” and “memory,” presenting to the audience “the physical nature in public spaces” and “the public awareness within the body”, which are key clues and distinctive aspects of Yin’s artistic practice. This sense of “publicness” is revealed through the artist’s subject consciousness, yet it strives to transcend the artist’s individuality within specific works, becoming shared experience and collective resonance.
Over the course of nearly two-decade exploration of sound art, most of Yin’s works were created or commissioned for specific exhibitions and projects. The deep engagement with particular sites and contexts imbues the works with a strong sense of locality. With the change of time and venue, this exhibition opens up space for the works to evolve and expand, while also summarizing Yin’s practice into three aspects: Firstly, reflections on how field recordings could transcend the limitations of recording technology, and how to get rid of the mode of music listening, which also involves creative ideas and approaches to “the sound ready-mades;” Secondly, reflections on the competition between “auditory sense and visual sense,” “sound and image,” making “sound-driven images” with the concept of “listening as a creative method;” Thirdly, the turn towards “auditory” sense in sound art.
The title of the exhibition is drawn from Yin Yi’s eponymous work in the form of an auditory theater,I Am Listening(2023), which will be launched again in the outdoor space of Yuz Museum. Yin Yi intertwines physical space, cultural history, and individual perception into the texts of instructions, guiding audience to autonomously engage in the auditory exercises within the surroundings of the museum and enjoy a dynamic“listening.”Thus, “I Am Listening” is not just a result or endpoint, but rather the starting point of a journey of listening.
