Artists Transform Worn Garments into Monumental Installations at Hayward Gallery
In a powerful exploration of memory and materiality, artists Yin Xiuzhen and Chiharu Shiota are showcasing their massive, moving installations in two parallel exhibitions at London's Hayward Gallery. These exhibitions, titled Heart to Heart and Threads of Life, delve into how everyday objects, particularly clothing and thread, can carry profound social and personal narratives.
The Fabric of Memory: Yin Xiuzhen's Artistic Vision
Yin Xiuzhen, a Beijing-born artist renowned for her large-scale works, prefers to describe the clothing in her installations as worn rather than secondhand. She explains that garments that have been worn act as a second skin, imprinted with social meaning and lived experiences. In her exhibition Heart to Heart, occupying the lower floor of the Hayward Gallery, Yin presents works where clothing serves as a narrator, embedding personal and collective histories into the fabric.
Some of Yin's pieces feature her own clothes, telling intimate stories, while others incorporate collected garments stretched across towering steel frames that resemble planes, trains, or organic forms. Her ongoing series, Portable Cities, reflects on urbanization by repurposing donated clothing from people worldwide into miniature soft sculptures of cities, housed in open suitcases. For the London show, she includes eight iterations, such as Beijing, New York, and a new London edition created from nearly 180 donated items.
Threads of Connection: Chiharu Shiota's Emotive Webs
Concurrently, on the second floor, Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota's exhibition Threads of Life features monumental web-like installations woven from thread and found objects like suitcases, keys, and letters. Based in Berlin, Shiota uses thread to create a sense of shared experience and existence, connecting memory to objects in daily life. Her work is deeply emotive, crafted entirely by hand on site using thousands of balls of yarn, often resulting in engulfing installations that explore themes of mortality and human relationships.
Shiota's artistic journey includes a background in painting and performance art, studying under Marina Abramović, before transitioning to thread in the 2000s. She describes how thread allows her to draw throughout entire spaces, mirroring human connections—sometimes clear, other times tangled, reflecting her own emotional states. Her personal battles with ovarian cancer have profoundly influenced her work, with installations like During Sleep featuring women in hospital beds encased in black thread, symbolizing fragility and resilience.
Overlapping Interests and Distinct Approaches
Although Yin and Shiota have exhibited together at biennials, this is their first time in such close proximity. Hayward Gallery's senior curator Yung Ma notes that both artists explore how textiles and found objects carry identity and lived experience, despite their different focuses. Yin, born in 1963, and Shiota, born in 1972, rose to international prominence in the late 1990s, with Ma highlighting the significance of two female artists with strong overlapping interests.
While both work with textiles, Shiota's use of yarn is more abstract, whereas Yin's clothing-based works often react to societal changes, such as urbanization and personal history. Yin grew up during China's Cultural Revolution, where new clothes were rare, fostering a kinship with textiles through her mother's work in a clothing factory. Her early piece, Dress Box from 1995, encapsulates 30 years of her own clothes in a sealed chest, entombing the past while reflecting on transformation.
Exhibition Details and Impact
Both exhibitions make full use of the Hayward Gallery's expansive space, featuring floor-to-ceiling installations that visitors can walk through. Through collected objects, Yin and Shiota map the experiences that connect us, preserving stories embedded in everyday things long after we are gone. Chiharu Shiota's Threads of Life and Yin Xiuzhen's Heart to Heart will be on display at the Hayward Gallery in London until May 3, offering a poignant look at how art can transform the mundane into the monumental.
