The Hayward Gallery will be transformed by two innovative and globally celebrated artists who use ordinary materials to create extraordinary works on a monumental scale: Chiharu Shiota and Yin Xiuzhen.
The Locked Room, 2016, Installation: old keys, wooden doors, red wool, KAAT Kanagawa Arts Theatre, Yokohama, Japan, Photo by Masanobu Nishino and courtesy of the artist © DACS, London, 2025 and Chiharu Shiota
Featuring new commissions and key existing pieces, these concurrent exhibitions explore the different ways both artists interweave textiles and found objects into deeply personal reflections on memory, identity and the human condition. Both presentations build on the Southbank Centre’s commitment to introducing international artists to new audiences and form part of its nationwide 75th anniversary celebrations, which run throughout 2026 and span events across London and the UK.
Yung Ma, Senior Curator of the Hayward Gallery, says:
“These solo exhibitions celebrate Yin and Shiota’s clearly distinct artistic styles and approaches, reflecting the different generations, places and teachings that have impacted their work. Yet, these artists can be seen as united by a sensibility – one that elevates their own personal perspectives to reflect on our wider shared experiences.”
Yin Xiuzhen, installation view of Collective Subconscious. Courtesy of the artist and Beijing Commune
Ralph Rugoff, Director of the Hayward Gallery, says:
“Continuing the Gallery’s legacy of showcasing artists whose installations interact with the Hayward’s iconic architecture, this will be a very exciting and moving pair of exhibitions. Both Yin and Shiota elevate humble, everyday materials into profound and poetic artistic statements. Exploring the tension between personal and collective memory and the transience of contemporary life, each artist’s work emphasises intimacy through tactile traces of human presence, while their immersive installations draw audiences into reflective, almost meditative spatial interactions. Transforming the objects we live with and leave behind, each artist offers a deeply human and emotionally charged experience .”
Chiharu Shiota: Threads of Life
Threads of Life is Berlin-based Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota’s first major solo exhibition in a London public gallery. The intricate takeover will see the artist weave immersive works from floor-to-ceiling across the Hayward Gallery’s top floor, following recent critically-acclaimed exhibitions in Beijing, Osaka, Tokyo and Paris. Accompanied by new large-scale sculptures, drawings, early performance videos and photographs, Shiota’s signature weblike works will respond to the gallery’s iconic brutalist architecture in a truly atmospheric presentation.
Shiota is a leading figure in the international art scene who returns to the Hayward Gallery for the first time since her participation in the group show Walking in My Mind (2009). Best-known for her large-scale installations which engulf ordinary objects – such as shoes, keys, beds, chairs and dresses – within huge structures of woolen thread, her work explores the body, memory, consciousness and the fragility of existence. Predominantly using red, black or white wool, her evocative pieces make visible the intangible connections we make throughout life. The resulting works are immersive and deeply emotive, often drawn from personal experiences that expand into universal human concerns such as life, death and relationships.
Collecting Feelings, 2024 Installation: rope, paper Musée du Pavillon de Vendôme; Musée des Tapisseries and Chapelle de la Visitation, Aix-en-Provence, France Photo: Philippe Biolatto, Ville d’Aix-en- Provence © DACS, London, 2025 and Chiharu Shiota
The exhibition will feature new iterations of Shiota’s past monumental installations, including The Locked Room (2016) and During Sleep (2002). As if painting three dimensionally in a space with string, these delicately woven structures allude to the shared experiences that interconnect us while creating a cocoon-like area that encloses visitors as they walk through it. Additionally, Threads of Life will include documentation of Shiota’s early performances, which probed the boundaries between the body, life and nature, as well as her latest collaboration with writer Yoko Tawada. For Tawada’s daily series The Trainee (2023–24), published in Japan’s Yomiuri newspaper, Shiota created around 400 watercolor and charcoal drawings, each stitched with her signature red threads.
Breathing from Earth, 2000 Performance / Installation: metal beds, bedding, black wool Kunstraum Maximilianstrasse, Stadtforum München, Munich, Germany Photo by Sabine Klem © DACS, London, 2025 and Chiharu Shiota
“This exhibition reflects the often-hidden connections between us, with each thread becoming a trace of our shared existence, weaving visible forms from the invisible threads of life. Through my work, I try to make sense of life and its uncertainties; each installation has grown from personal experiences, such as losing my father, facing death and questioning what it means to be human. While we live our lives separately, we are, at the same time, deeply connected. With this exhibition, I want to highlight the marvelous aspects of ordinary existence.”
Chiharu Shiota
A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany this exhibition, including a newly produced essay by exhibition curator Yung Ma and an interview between Shiota and Yoko Tawada.
Yin Xiuzhen: Heart to Heart
Running concurrently, the first major UK survey of work by leading Chinese artist Yin Xiuzhen invites visitors to step into her spellbinding world. Spanning the entire lower-level galleries, the exhibition will bring together seminal projects from the past three decades, alongside new commissions and historic works reimagined for the space. Through large-scale installations made from everyday objects, industrial materials and used items of clothing, Heart to Heart invites us to see the familiar in new ways, revealing the personal and collective stories these overlooked items carry.
Yin Xiuzhen, Washing River. Courtesy of the artist and Beijing Commune
Yin is a pioneering artist of her generation who first emerged on the contemporary Chinese art scene in the early 1990s. Like many of her contemporaries, her career developed at the same time as major cultural, economic and social changes in China. Observing the country’s fast economic growth, urbanisation and global integration, Yin was keen to explore how living in an increasingly connected world can impact identity. She began working with mundane materials – including cement, ceramics, glass, clay, food and household objects – to uncover the traces of memory, personal history and time embedded within them.
Yin Xiuzhen, Thought, 2009. Used clothes, steel 340 x 510 x 370 cm. Installation view, Pace Gallery, Beijing. Photo: Courtesy of the artist, Beijing Commune, and Pace
Yin Xiuzhen, Thought, 2009. Used clothes, steel 340 x 510 x 370 cm. Installation view, Pace Gallery, Beijing. Photo: Courtesy of the artist, Beijing Commune, and Pace
Heart to Heart will comprehensively present Yin’s artistic journey across installation, sculpture, photography, video, wall-based works and archival materials of her early performances. The exhibition takes its name from a new commission: a huge, immersive textile installation shaped like a human heart. Inviting visitors to step inside, the work will be built from used clothing items collected from a wide array of people, signifying the gathering of our shared memories to create a space for reflection on how our individual and collective experiences intertwine.
Yin Xiuzhen, International Airline. Courtesy of the artist and Beijing Commune.
“The heart is our human engine and, in my culture, it transcends the mind. ‘Heart-to-heart’ is a way to connect and I am delighted to have this chance to engage in a heart-to-heart dialogue with visitors of the Hayward Gallery, drawing on my thirty-plus years of practice; this exhibition is an opportunity for mutual exchange, one I hope will generate sparks.”
Yin Xiuzhen
A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition, including a newly commissioned essay by curator and writer Lydia Yee alongside a conversation between Yin and exhibition curator Yung Ma.
Chiharu Shiota: Threads of Life and Yin Xiuzhen: Heart to Heart 17th February – 3th May 2026 Hayward Gallery
Full price standard ticket which grants access to both exhibitions: £19, Concessions available & Southbank Centre Members go free.
About the artists
Chiharu Shiota, Berlin, 2024
Chiharu Shiota (b. 1972 Osaka, Japan), has lived and worked in Berlin since 1999. Shiota has exhibited across the world at institutions such as Istanbul Museum of Modern Art (2025); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2025); Museum für Kunst + Geschichte, Fribourg (2025); Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao (2025); Kunsthalle Praha, Prague (2025); Jupiter Museum of Art, Shenzhen (2025); Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing (2025); Casa Wabi, Puerto Escondido (2025); Grand Palais, Paris (2024); Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka (2024); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art (QAGoMA), Brisbane (2022); ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, Karlsruhe (2021); Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington (2020); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2019); Gropius Bau, Berlin (2019); Art Gallery of South Australia (2018); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (2018); Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2017); K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2015); Smithsonian Institution Arthur M.Sackler Gallery, Washington DC (2014); the Museum of Art, Kochi (2013); and the National Museum of Art, Osaka (2008) among others. She has also participated in numerous international exhibitions such as Oku-Noto International Art Festival (2017), Sydney Biennale (2016), Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale (2009) and Yokohama Triennale (2001). In 2015, Shiota was selected to represent Japan at the 56th Venice Biennale.
She was awarded the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology’s Art Encouragement Prize in Japan again in 2024, after receiving the prize as a new artist in 2008.
About Yin Xiuzhen
Born 1963 in Beijing, Yin Xiuzhen has held numerous notable solo exhibitions internationally, including Piercing the Sky at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai (2024–25), Yin Xiuzhen: Sky Patch at CHAT – Centre for Heritage Arts and Textile in Hong Kong (2020), Slow Release at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow (2016), at the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in Germany (2012–13), and a solo presentation at Museum of Modern Art in New York entitled Projects 92: Yin Xiuzhen (2010).
Yin has also participated in many group exhibitions and collection displays. Her work was featured in Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (2024–25); Global(e) Resistance at the Centre Pompidou (2020–21); Asian Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World at the Guggenheim Museum (2017–18); The World Is Yours at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (2009); and Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum (2007). Furthermore, Yin has been widely shown in international biennials and triennials. She exhibited in the Chinese Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007 and returned to the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019 as part of the main exhibition. Yin’s works can be found in the numerous public and private collections worldwide, such as Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; M+, Hong Kong; and National Art Museum of China, Beijing, among others.
CategoriesTags