Chiharu Shiota Meets Yin Xiuzhen
A notable collaboration between Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota and Chinese artist Yin Xiuzhen is now on display at London's Hayward Gallery. Shiota's signature woven webs intersect with Yin's installations made from clothing, creating a dialogue about memory, identity, and materiality alongside experimental works like Henri Purnell's glass bead sculptures.
The concurrent solo exhibitions, "Threads of Life" by Chiharu Shiota and "Heart to Heart" by Yin Xiuzhen, are part of the Southbank Centre's 75th-anniversary program and run until May 3, 2026. Curator Yung Ma united the two artists for their shared "sensibility" in transforming humble, everyday materials into poetic statements about personal and collective memory. Berlin-based Chiharu Shiota moved from painting to "drawing in the air" with thread to better express her emotions. The threads' colors are symbolic: red for the blood-colored "Red Thread of Fate" that connects people, black representing the cosmos, and white for purity. Her installations are deeply personal, shaped by her experiences with loss and a battle with cancer, which she says makes her question what it means to be human. One of Shiota's installations, "The Locked Room," features a dense web of red thread holding thousands of keys, an evolution of her acclaimed 2015 Venice Biennale piece, "The Key in the Hand." Another work, "During Sleep," cocoons beds in black thread, a manifestation of dreams, illness, and death that originated from the artist weaving threads around her own bed in her early years in Germany. Yin Xiuzhen’s use of worn clothing is a direct response to the rapid and disorienting modernization of her native Beijing, where buildings would disappear overnight. Her mother worked in a garment factory, giving her an early connection to textiles as a "second skin" imprinted with the wearer's experiences and social meaning. For her ongoing "Portable Cities" series, Yin collects used clothing from residents of various cities to construct miniature, soft-sculpture versions of their skylines inside suitcases. This series explores the themes of globalization, memory, and the transient nature of modern life, where the idea of a permanent home is constantly being re-evaluated. Yin's work often carries a political and environmental message. An early performance piece, "Washing the River" (1995), involved freezing 10 cubic meters of polluted river water and inviting the public to wash the ice, a commentary on the ecological damage caused by industrialization. While Shiota's work delves into an abstract, inner landscape of human connection, Yin's is a tactile reaction to the external forces of social change and globalization. Together, their installations at the Hayward Gallery create a powerful dialogue about how memory and identity are embedded in the materials that surround us.
