Chiharu Shiota: Threads of Life and Yin Xiuzhen’s Heart to Heart

Join us for an after-hours tour of the Hayward Gallery’s latest exhibition of Chiharu Shiota: Threads of Life and Yin Xiuzhen’s Heart to Heart.

Chiharu Shiota is best-known for her large-scale installations which engulf ordinary objects – such as shoes, keys, beds, chairs and dresses – within huge web structures made from woollen thread.

The resulting works are immersive and deeply emotive, often drawing from personal experience, which Shiota expands into universal human concerns such as life, death and relationships.

Accompanied by new large-scale sculptures, drawings, early performance videos and photographs, the artist’s signature works are woven from floor-to-ceiling across the Hayward Gallery’s top floor, responding to the gallery’s iconic brutalist architecture in a truly atmospheric presentation.

The exhibition features new iterations of Shiota’s past monumental installations, including During Sleep (2026), which is activated with performances throughout the run of the exhibition.

Yin Xiuzhen is renowned for her use of secondhand clothing, concrete, food and household ephemera in her immersive installations and sculptures.

She creates multimedia artworks that negotiate the spaces between memories, individuals and the globalised societies that we live in today.

Drawing on over 30 years of creation, the exhibition brings together a selection of the artist’s seminal projects alongside a number of new commissions, and is the first major UK survey of her work.

This will be led by lead-curator