LONDON.- From 17 February - 3 May 2026, 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. 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."

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.

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.

Chiharu Shiota says: "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."

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 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.

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 says: "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."

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.