These clothes are not “secondhand”, says Yin Xiuzhen, the Beijing-born artist known for creating large-scale installations out of found garments and keepsakes. “I prefer to call them ‘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 her own, telling a personal story. In others, the clothes are collected, stained and stretched across towering steel frames resembling planes, trains or organic forms.
Yin is showing a selection of these works in Heart to Heart, an exhibition occupying the lower floor of London’s Hayward Gallery. “Worn clothing acts as a narrator in my work … the lived experience is embedded in the fabric,” she says.
