©TVOI Meeting with Yiqing Yin, textile designer and sculptor
Can you tell us more about your background and the exhibition you are presenting in Calais?
“I am a creator, designer, and seamstress. I am currently presenting my first major monograph through some sixty silhouettes, retracing my creative journey from my beginnings to my most recent research. The exhibition goes far beyond simple clothing: it is punctuated by sensitive and personal inspirations with perfumes, poems, videos, drawings, words, and images that reveal my artistic talents.”
How did you find your way into textiles?
“Before joining the Decorative Arts School, I saw myself more as a sculptor. What has always guided me is my relationship with the material. One day, my hand encountered a malleable, expressive textile. I fell in love with it. Working on the body, as a living and active medium, gave me a new way of sculpting.”
Like automatic writing, it is a sensitive, intuitive process, difficult to define – but it is precisely this vagueness that interests me.
©TVOI 
©TVOI The exhibition and its route appeal to all the senses: sight, hearing and even smell...
What led you to this immersive and thoughtful format?
“This range of sensations allows us to open our eyes to a more intuitive, more intimate world.
I didn't just want to show clothes, but to share a creative process, made of wanderings, chance encounters, happy accidents. Appealing to the senses is opening the door to this inner world, making the invisible perceptible.”
Your work is perceived as fine as steam, sensitive, but also extremely technical.
“It's a constant balance between rigor and chance. For example, smocking or pleating techniques require pinpoint precision, a thread that follows a perfect trajectory… right up to the gathering, when everything transforms into a whirlwind. You can never predict everything—and it's precisely this element of mystery that I want to preserve.
Even if I don't seek to reveal everything consciously or explicitly, I sow clues, fragments. Like automatic writing. It's a sensitive, intuitive approach, difficult to define – but it's precisely this vagueness that interests me.”
©TVOI City of Lace You also collaborate with other artists. Do you have a notable collaboration to share?
The most recent is with Solène Jolivet, a textile artist who paints with thread. She gave me some magnificent palettes, which I transformed into a dress made of tens of thousands of threads. A piece somewhere between science fiction and anthropology, imagined as part of the Mots spatialisés project initiated by designer Octave de Gaulle. It will join a collective collection for an “archaeological museum of the future.” A wonderful artistic adventure.
©TVOI City of Lace 
©TVOI City of Lace 
Is there a piece in the exhibition that is particularly dear to your heart?
“It’s hard to choose… Each piece tells a story, a moment in life, an encounter, a visual or emotional shock. They are all deeply connected to my personal journey.”
— Yiqing Yin