What We Leave Behind: The Southbank Centre Unites Two Artists Across Memory and Time

The Hayward Gallery has given its current season entirely to two artists who have never before shared an institutional space: Chiharu Shiota, a Japanese artist based in Berlin, and Yin Xiuzhen, a pioneering figure in contemporary Chinese art. They come from different generations, different places and different artistic traditions, facts the gallery's own curator is careful to acknowledge. And yet with Shiota's Threads of Life occupying the top floor and Yin's Heart to Heart spanning the entire lower level, there is a fluid conversation between the two across the exhibition(s). The question both artists seem to be asking, though neither state it quite so plainly, is what meaning do the things we live with and the things we leave behind actually carry?

The curatorial logic here is precise. Yung Ma, the gallery's Senior Curator, is careful to acknowledge both artists' "clearly distinct artistic styles and approaches, reflecting the different generations, places and teachings that have impacted their work," before arguing that they are nonetheless "united by a sensibility, one that elevates their own personal perspectives to reflect on our wider shared experiences." That two artists could arrive at such similar instincts from such different starting points is itself part of what the season is arguing: that the urge to find meaning in overlooked materials is not a stylistic choice but something closer to a constant human desire to do this.

Installation view of Chiharu Shiota: Threads of Life. Threads of Life (2026). Image Credit: Mark Blower. Courtesy of the Hayward Gallery. © DACS, London, 2026 and Chiharu Shiota.

If Shiota's practice is the proof of that argument, it is an immediately legible one. Threads of Life marks her first major solo exhibition in a London public gallery, arriving fresh from critically acclaimed shows in Beijing, Osaka, Tokyo and Paris. Her signature works are immediately recognisable as vast weblike structures of wool, predominantly red, black or white, that engulf ordinary objects and fill entire rooms from floor to ceiling. In the Hayward's brutalist top floor spaces, the scale of these installations is genuinely overwhelming, their dense woven forms responding to the architecture in ways that make the building feel, for once, quite intimate. Each thread, in Shiota's own words, becomes "a trace of our shared existence, weaving visible forms from the invisible threads of life", a statement that could read as precious on the page but lands very differently when you are standing inside one of these works, enclosed by it.

The exhibition draws on key existing works alongside new commissions, including new iterations of The Locked Room (2016) and During Sleep (2002), works in which the woven structures create cocoon-like enclosures that visitors move through. Also on show is documentation of Shiota's early performances, which explored the boundaries between body, and nature, as well as around 400 watercolour and charcoal drawings stitched with red thread, made in collaboration with writer Yoko Tawada for her daily newspaper series The Trainee. What emerges across all of it is an artistic practice rooted in deeply personal experience like confrontations with death, and questions about what it means to be human, these elements consistently expand outward into something universally felt.

Chiharu Shiota, During Sleep, 2002. Performance/installation: with performers sleeping during the opening; beds, black wool. Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland. Image credit: Sunhi Mang. © DACS, London, 2026 and Chiharu Shiota

Chiharu Shiota, The Locked Room, 2016, Installation: old keys, wooden doors, red wool. KAAT Kanagawa Arts Theatre, Yokohama, Japan. Image credit: Masanobu Nishino, courtesy of the artist © DACS, London, 2026 and Chiharu Shiota

Yin Xiuzhen's Heart to Heart, by contrast, arrives in London as the first major UK survey of her three-decade career, and it is long overdue. Yin emerged on the contemporary Chinese art scene in the early 1990s, her practice developing in parallel with the rapid economic transformation of China itself. Watching her country urbanise and integrate into global culture at extraordinary speed, she became preoccupied with what that transformation cost. Namely, it was the personal histories, the overlooked objects, and traces of lives lived all which risked being swept away by progress. She turned to mundane materials like cement, ceramics, used clothing, and household objects, out of her conviction that these things hold what more prestigious materials cannot.

Heart to Heart's centrepiece is a new commission that gives the show its name: a vast, immersive textile installation shaped like a human heart, built from used clothing collected from a wide array of people. Visitors are invited to step inside it. The gesture is characteristic of Yin's practice which aims to physically draw the audience into the work, making them part of its meaning. "The heart is our human engine," she has said, "and in my culture, it transcends the mind." That the structure is built from other people's clothes, each item carrying its own invisible history, gives the work a cumulative emotional weight that is difficult to articulate and impossible to ignore.

Installation view of Yin Xiuzhen: Heart to Heart. Image credit: Mark Blower. Courtesy of the Hayward Gallery.

Installation view of Yin Xiuzhen: Heart to Heart. A Heart to Heart (2025). Image credit: Mark Blower. Courtesy of the Hayward Gallery.

What the Hayward has achieved by placing these two exhibitions side by side is something that neither show could accomplish alone. Shiota's threads make visible the connections between people across time and distance. Yin's collected garments materialise the stories that ordinary lives accumulate that the world too often discards. Together they build a precise and patient case for the fact that the most urgent artistic territory is not the grand or the abstract but the intimate and the overlooked. With decades of work between these two artists, at the centre of their joint exhibition is the same insistence, that art is the place where what we leave behind can finally be seen.