Fabric of memory: the artists turning secondhand clothes into monumental art

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

These 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.”

The two artists have exhibited on the same programme at biennials, but never in such close proximity. While their exhibitions are distinct, Hayward Gallery’s senior curator Yung Ma hopes that the artists’ overlapping interests will resonate between the gallery walls. “Both artists explore how textiles and found objects can carry identity and lived experience,” he says. Although they are roughly 10 years apart in age – Yin was born in 1963, and Shiota in 1972 – they rose to the international stage at around the same time in the late 90s. “Two female artists … with such strong overlapping interests – that feels significant,” says Ma.

Memory and material are the most evident parallels in their work, but they approach it from different positions. “We use similar materials and objects, like suitcases, and an interest in various aspects of human existence within society, but our exhibitions have different focuses,” says Shiota.

Both artists work with textiles, but Shiota’s use of yarn is more abstract. She started working with material in the 00s, but before that she was a painter and then a performance artist studying under Marina Abramović in Berlin. “With painting, you’re working in two dimensions, but by using thread, I could draw throughout the entire space,” she says. “As I continued working with it, the act began to feel very close to human relationships … Sometimes the thread looks like it’s connecting people; at other times, when my work becomes very tangled, it reflects moments when my own feelings are confused or unsettled.”

This material is the literal and figurative thread that ties collective memories and experiences together, represented by objects that Shiota collects from flea markets and donation boxes. Her work is deeply emotive and engulfing, crafted entirely by hand on site using thousands of balls of yarn. However, the result is not always inviting. During Sleep is an installation with a performance element in which women lie in hospital beds encased in a dense black thread. The performance, which will take place monthly across the run of the Hayward exhibition, represents Shiota’s interest in mortality and the fragility of life.

These are themes that draw from her personal battles with ovarian cancer – first in 2005 and again in 2017. The first diagnosis was a “huge shock”, she says, arriving just as the artist was planning to have a child with her husband of three years. “The fear that I might not be able to give birth was very painful,” she says. After intense chemotherapy and surgery, Shiota recovered and was able to have a child. But after a 12-year remission, the doctors found a malignant tumour. “The second time was different,” she says. “At that point, it wasn’t a question of what to do next – it was a real possibility that I might die.” Shiota was just starting to work on her landmark solo exhibition, The Soul Trembles, at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum. “It was incredibly hard … I thought deeply about what happens to the soul and where it goes if I disappear.” The 2019 show became the second-most visited exhibition in the institution’s history. “I truly could have died,” says Shiota, whose cancer is now in remission. “Just being able to have that exhibition felt incredibly special in itself.”

While Shiota’s craft is informed by her inner landscape, Yin’s work is often a reaction to the changing world around her – “the perceptions and reflections of an individual life within the vastness of the world”, as she puts it. For her, clothing is a medium that is deeply intertwined with her personal life and her country’s history. Yin grew up during the Cultural Revolution, in a planned economy where new garments were a rarity. Luckily, her mother worked in a clothing factory, and every Chinese lunar new year she brought home scraps of fabric to sew new clothes for the family. Through her mother, Yin developed a kinship with textiles, and after graduating high school in 1981 she set her heart on studying art. She spent the next four years working as an interior painter while preparing for entrance exams, eventually enrolling in the Department of Fine Arts at Beijing’s Capital Normal University in 1985.

Yin’s earliest work to feature clothing is Dress Box (1995). The artist gathered 30 years of her own clothes, placed them in her father’s wooden chest and sealed it with cement. Inside the lid on a bronze plaque are the following words: “These clothes are the clothes that I’ve worn over the past three decades; they carry my experiences, memory, and physical traces of time.” Yin is entombing the past, while reflecting on the transformation she has witnessed throughout her life. The artist has seen multiple tower blocks displace traditional houses and alleys; she has been forced out of her own studio more than once.

Portable Cities is an ongoing series that reflects on urbanisation. She collects clothes from people all over the world and repurposes them into miniature soft sculptures of their cities, housed in an open suitcase. For the Hayward show, she presents eight iterations of the project, including Beijing, New York and the latest edition, London. In the lead-up to the Hayward show, Yin collected nearly 180 items of clothing through a donation box at the Southbank Centre. “It forms a tactile map of the city in my heart,” she says. “Those who donated garments may be able to locate their personal contribution within the work.”

Both exhibitions make full use of Hayward’s expansive space, featuring floor-to-ceiling installations visitors can walk through. Through collected objects, they map the experiences that connect us – and preserve the stories embedded in everyday things, long after we’re gone.

Chiharu Shiota’s Threads of Life and Yin Xiuzhen’s Heart to Heart are at the Hayward Gallery, London, to 3 May.