Yin Xiuzhen and Chiharu Shiota review – so on-the-nose it gives you a nosebleed

One artist critiques capitalism via sculptures made of tatty T-shirts. The other weaves threads like a hyperactive spider. Neither say much – but they’ll look great on Instagram

Grief takes many forms. Chinese artist Yin Xiuzhen mourns by preserving, stitching, sewing. Working in 1990s Beijing, she saw a city transforming so fast, and casting off its history with so little ceremony, that she had to save it somehow. Her show at the Hayward is full of scraps of the past, piled up, splayed out and knitted together in a desperate attempt to slow the onslaught of modernisation.

Obviously, it didn’t work, Beijing is as modernised as cities come, but the works within her show, Heart to Heart, are a knowingly futile gesture. A little wooden trunk, built by the artist’s father, is filled with a neat stack of her old clothes, all encased in concrete. The soft warmth of her personal past preserved in the cold brutality of composite, the material irrevocably transforming her city and her life. Nearby, traditional roof tiles are scattered on the floor around an old Chinese cupboard, all covered in a thick, filthy layer of cement powder. Everywhere you look, the past is being buried to make way for the future.

A minivan in the middle of the room has been extended, its body lengthened into a stitched-together concertina of recycled clothes. She is trying, over and over, to maintain some kind of link to humanity, to the past, in the face of unstoppable change and evolution.

The futility of it all is obvious and makes these early works feel tangibly sad. Photos of an early installation show big blocks of ice made from polluted river water being symbolically scrubbed by passersby on the riverbank. “We cannot stop the physical impact of pollution on a small scale,” she says in a quote on the wall, “but we can create moments of collective reflection.”

This early work is deeply felt and moving. Which you can’t really say for the more recent stuff here. She encases books in old fabric; she makes models of cities out of old clothes and packs them into suitcases. There’s a whole luggage carousel built into the gallery and a jumbo jet made out of tatty T-shirts hanging from the ceiling. The whole thing looks tacky, like a tourist-trap model village made of rags, a charity shop version of Legoland and, worst of all, it’s barely saying anything.

Ideas of commerce, global trade and their exploitative capitalistic tendencies are written into the material she uses – that’s the narrative baked into the fabric of recycled textiles. But there’s no criticism, no depth, no point to its use in these works. Here’s some old T-shirts turned into Big Ben. Ta-dah.

The main installation here is a giant human heart – yes, made of old T-shirts – intended as a space for, and I quote, “deep and meaningful conversations”. You have to create your own meaning here, because the artist can’t really be bothered.

Upstairs, another exhibition – dubbed Threads of Life – finds Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota weaving endless webs of red and black thread. Shiota’s work has been a social media phenomenon in recent years, and the Hayward is obviously hoping that her dizzying, knotty installations will get the punters in.

The first room is a tangled nightmare of crimson lines dangling with keys. We’re all connected, but how do we unlock those connections? Got it. The second room is filled with emotional letters of thanks, stapled to red threads hanging from the ceiling. Literally tugging on heart strings. Got it. Red string gets swapped for black in the final space, all woven around beds, like the Hayward has opened the world’s dirtiest, gothiest, spideriest hotel.

The whole thing’s about blood and death and life and how we’re all connected, sure. But it’s so superficial that it’s totally meaningless, so on the nose it gives you a nosebleed. It’s so about everything, it’s essentially about nothing.

But, and this is crucial, it will look good on your social media feed. Art institutions are in a tough bind – ha, like with threads! Either they put on interesting, clever, powerful art that no one comes to see, or they bow to the pressure of hosting pretty, vacuous immersive installations that will look good on Instagram in the desperate hope of selling some tickets. Damned if they do, ’grammed if they don’t.

Realistically, this isn’t aimed at anyone who wants a genuine encounter with art; it’s aimed at people who want to take selfies in galleries. I hope it works for them, because otherwise it’s a real waste of thread.

• Yin Xiuzhen: Heart to Heart and Chiharu Shiota: Threads of Life are at Hayward Gallery, London, until 3 May.