There’s a double bill going on at the Hayward Gallery, and the theme is fabrics: whether it’s what we wear or the fabric of life itself. One ticket gains entry to two companion exhibitions – designed to be experienced one after the other, both shows are riffs on a similar theme.
First up is Chinese sculpture artist Yin Xiuzhen’s Heart to Heart, an ode to used clothes by the Chinese sculpture artist. She describes clothing as a ‘second skin’ which collects the essence of every wearer. A garment, then, becomes a tapestry of all the bodies it’s clothed. Memory is embedded into matter. This effect magnifies with the size of her installations.
Xiuzhen’s ‘Portable Cities’ series is a tribute to how every suitcase is a home, especially since many of us live out of our bags on the move. Unfolding over an airport luggage carousel stitched together using black and white clothes, suitcases contain different cities made out of the garments of its citizens. Hovering above is a gigantic aeroplane, similarly fashioned together. Suitcases, trunks, and other storage receptacles reappear throughout the show; to Xiuzhen ‘home is no longer a fixed address but a collection of belongings packed and ready for transport.’
In the next room is ‘Collective Subconscious (Blue)’: a minibus cut in half and elongated into something resembling a caterpillar. Four-hundred pieces of clothing stitched together and stretched over a metal frame make up the body of this vehicle. As you peer in through the side door down the length of the corridor, the artwork invites you to imagine the previous wearers of all these garments. Their presence is palpable, despite the empty seats inside.
Elsewhere in the show Xiuzhen grieves the disappearance of entire neighbourhoods she witnessed during the dizzying urbanisation of her native Beijing. She remembers the air being thick with cement dust. Wanting to preserve something amidst her ever-changing surroundings, she has folded up the clothes she grew up wearing, stacked them in a wooden trunk and poured concrete around them. ‘Dress Box’, thus, is the union between the building materials of her home and self.
A perplexingly dense tangle of crimson thread leaps from one wall to another, as if alive.
Upstairs, the materials defining Xiuzhen’s work are being unravelled in Chiharu Shiota’s Threads of Life. A perplexingly dense tangle of crimson thread leaps from one wall to another across the whole space, as if alive. Dangling from this are hundreds of keys – maybe one of them fits the double doors standing in the middle of the room, upon which more thread encroaches. Walking through this room feels like searching through one’s memory for the correct key that’ll unlock something. Precariously constructed, all it’ll take is someone tripping on their shoelaces to bring half the installation down – this speaks to our own fragile mortality, something Shiota grappled with during her battle with ovarian cancer.
In the next room, countless strands of red thread cascade from the ceiling, carrying a rain of letters, the pages frozen mid-flutter. ‘Letters of Thanks’ reflects on how it’s easier to bare one’s soul in writing than in speech. With every exhibition of this artwork, Shiota has invited people to share thank-you letters which eventually end up as part of the piece, creating a grateful chorus of voices from Brazil, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Japan, and now London.
Shiota can’t explore memory without thinking about home – a shaky concept for the artist who moved house nine times in three years when she migrated to Germany from Japan. ‘During Sleep’ resulted from that unsettled period. Ten white hospital beds are arranged in rows, consumed by a thick web of black thread. The shadowy mass climbs down walls and fills the room like the descent of sleep. Seen through this haze, the other visitors look like vague figures floating through a dream.
On top of the excellent value for money you get from both exhibitions, as well as their entrancing scale, the installations encourage you to engage with how they’ve been constructed and exhibited. You start looking for the staple pins securing Shiota’s threads to the wall or the intricate stitching that transforms a pile of clothes into Xiuzhen’s monuments. The art is immersive, while encouraging you to peek behind the curtain.
Many audiences will be left pondering the ideas surrounding sustainability posed in the works of both artists. But more universally, both shows tap into something invisible yet ever-present; whether it’s the interconnectedness of all things, or how history moves forward one wardrobe change at a time.
