Yin Xiuzhen builds cities from donated clothing while Chiharu Shiota weaves found objects into vast webs of thread. Now the two are exhibiting their massive, moving installations in two parallel exhibitions
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hese clothes are not “secondhand”, says Yin Xiuzhen, the Beijing-born artist known for creating large-scale installations out of found garments and keepsakes. “I prefer to call them ‘used’ or ‘worn’,” she explains. “Clothes that have been ‘worn’ carry a lot of information … like a second skin, imprinted with social meaning.” In some of Yin’s works the clothes are her own, telling a personal story. In others, the clothes are collected, stained and stretched across towering steel frames resembling planes, trains or organic forms.
Yin is showing a selection of these works in Heart to Heart, an exhibition occupying the lower floor of London’s Hayward Gallery. “Worn clothing acts as a narrator in my work … the lived experience is embedded in the fabric,” she says.
This sentiment is somewhat shared by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota, whose exhibition, Threads of Life, runs concurrently on the second floor of the gallery. Using thread as her primary material, the Berlin-based artist weaves found objects such as suitcases, keys and letters into monumental web-like installations. “I want to create this feeling of shared experience and existence,” she says. “Memory exists inside each person, but it is also connected to objects in our daily life.”
