Fabric of Memory: Artists turn used clothes into monumental art | art

TThese clothes are not “used,” says Yin Xiu Chen, the Beijing-born artist known for creating large-scale installations of found clothing and memorabilia. “I prefer to call it ‘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 their own, telling a personal story. In others, clothes are collected, dyed, and stretched across towering steel frames that resemble airplanes, trains, or organic shapes.

Yin displays a selection of these works in Heart to Heart., An exhibition occupying the basement of the Hayward Gallery in London. She says: “Worn clothes play the role of narrator in my work… Life experience is an integral part of the fabric.”

This sentiment is shared to some extent by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota, whose exhibition “Threads of Life.” At the same time on the second floor of the gallery. Using thread as her primary material, the Berlin-based artist weaves objects such as suitcases, keys and letters into massive web-like installations. “I want to create that feeling of shared experience and presence,” she says. “Memory exists within every person, but it is also linked to objects in our daily lives.”

The two artists showed their work in the same program at the biennials, but never before had they shown their work in such close proximity. Although their exhibitions are distinct, Hayward’s chief curator, Yong Ma, hopes the artists’ overlapping interests will resonate within the gallery’s walls. “Both artists explore how textiles and found objects can carry identity and lived experience,” he says. Although they have an age difference of about 10 years – Yin was born in 1963, and Shiota in 1972 – they both rose to the international stage around the same time in the late 1990s. “Two artists… have strong overlapping interests — and that seems important,” says Ma.

Memory and matter are the most notable similarities in their work, but they approach them from different places. “We use similar materials and objects, such as suitcases, and are interested in different aspects of human existence within society, but our exhibitions have different focuses,” Shiota says.

Both artists work with textiles, but Shiota’s use of yarn is more abstract. She began working with materials in the 2000s, but before that she was a painter and then a performance artist studying under Marina Abramović in Berlin. “In drawing, you work in two dimensions, but with string, I can draw all over the space,” she says. “As I continued to work with it, the action began to seem very close to human relationships… Sometimes the thread seems to connect people; other times, when my work becomes too tangled, it reflects moments when my feelings are confused or unstable.”

This material is the literal and metaphorical thread that links collective memories and experiences together, represented by the objects Shiota collects from flea markets and donation boxes. Her work is very emotive and immersive, and is made entirely by hand on site using thousands of balls of thread. However, the result is not always attractive. While sleeping It is an installation that includes a performance element in which women lie on hospital beds covered with thick black thread. The show, which will be performed monthly over the course of the Hayward Gallery, represents Shiota’s interest in mortality and the fragility of life.

These are themes she draws 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 extensive chemotherapy and surgery, Shiota recovered and was able to give birth to a child. But after a 12-year recovery, doctors discovered a malignant tumor. “The second time was different,” she says. “At that point, the question wasn’t what to do next, it was a real possibility that I might die.” Shiota had just begun work on her landmark solo exhibition, The Soul Trembles, at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. “It was very difficult… I thought deeply about what happens to the soul and where it would go if it disappeared.” The 2019 exhibition became the second most visited exhibition in the institution’s history. “I really could have died,” says Shiota, whose cancer is now in remission. “Just being able to make this show feel incredibly special in itself.”

While Shiota’s craft is inspired by her inner landscape, Yin’s work is often a reaction to the changing world around her — “perceptions and reflections of individual lives within the vastness of the world,” as she puts it. For her, clothing is a medium deeply intertwined with her personal life and the history of her country. Yin grew up during the Cultural Revolution, in a planned economy where new clothes were rare. Fortunately, her mother worked in a clothing factory, and every Chinese Lunar New Year she would bring home scraps of fabric to sew new clothes for the family. Through her mother, Yin developed an affinity with textiles, and after graduating from high school in 1981, she decided to study art. She spent the next four years working as an in-house painter while preparing for entrance exams, eventually enrolling in the Fine Arts Department of Capital Normal University in Beijing in 1985.

Yin’s first clothing display business is Dress Box (1995). The artist collected 30-year-old clothes, put them in her father’s wooden box and closed it with cement. Inside the cover on a bronze plaque are the following words: “These clothes are the clothes I have worn over the past three decades, and they carry my experiences, my memories, and the physical traces of time.” Yin buries the past as she reflects on the transformation she has witnessed throughout her life. The artist has seen multiple towers replacing traditional houses and alleys. She has been forced out of her studio more than once.

Portable cities It is a continuous series that reflects urbanization. She collects clothes from people all over the world and repurposes them into miniature soft sculptures of their cities, placed in an open suitcase. At the Hayward Gallery, eight versions of the project were presented, including Beijing, New York and the latest version in London. In the lead-up to the Hayward show, Yin collected approximately 180 items of clothing through the donation box at the Southbank Centre. “It forms a tangible map of the city in my heart,” she says. “Those who have donated clothing may be able to identify their personal contribution within the work.”

Both galleries take full advantage of Hayward’s expansive space, which features floor-to-ceiling installations that visitors can walk through. Through collected objects, they map the experiences that connect us—and preserve the stories embedded in everyday objects, long after we are gone.

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