The Mori Art Museum is holding the largest and most comprehensive exhibition ever devoted to multidisciplinary artist Chiharu Shiota. Titled “The Soul Trembles”, the show traces the past 25 years of the Japanese artist’s practice, with some of her most significant works on display, including some of her large installations and sculptural works, as well as video footage of performances, photographs, drawings and performing arts-related material, among others. Chiharu Shiota’s oeuvre engages with universal concepts of identity, boundaries and existence, tackling themes of memory, loss and displacement, as well as life and death, and belonging. Her poetic art arises from personal experiences and emotional states, often diplaying a theatricality that at times turns dark and mysterious. Her seemigly delicate and ephemeral works create an oniric atmosphere, a space of silence, of dream, and of reflection and introspection. Shiota has come to be known for her large, at times monumental installations of woven yarn, primarily red or black, strung across entire spaces.
Born in Osaka in 1972, Chiharu Shiota now lives and works in Berlin. In a Brilliant Ideas video profile by Bloomberg, the artist says that words often are not enough to express her thoughts, while through art she can visualise what her mind is hiding, and she recounts how she decided to turn to art:
My parents had a small factory, they produced wooden boxes for transporting fish. There were people working with machines, working like machines. I grew up watching them and decided I didn’t want to work like a machine. I wanted to be in a more creating environment, that’s why I became an artist.
During her studies at Kyoto Seika University, she undertook an exchange residency at Canberra School of Art, Australia, moving to Germany to study in 1996, where she has been based since. Her time in Australia proved a decisive moment in her artistic education and laid the path for her future practice. At the time she was working with drawing and painting, and she felt like she was just doing art for art’s sake.
As she reveals in the Brilliant Ideas video profile, when she started thinking about her own existence, she only found emptiness. She says:
I had a dream… I dreamt that I was a part of the painting. When I moved, the painting became better. The day after the dream, I bought enamel paint, which is very poisonous for the skin… and covered myself with the paint. And I created the piece ‘Becoming Painting’.
The visceral performative work paved the way for Shiota’s experimentation that lead to the use of what would later become her signature material – thread – in performances as well as three-dimensional scultpural and installation works. She recounts that when she couldn’t paint anymore, she started to shift from two-dimensions to three-dimensions, and “started to draw in the space with yarn”. She reveals that “Working with yarn is like drawing for me.”
When in Germany, she immersed herself in performance art with Marina Abramovic, finding new inspiration in Berlin. When studying with her, the renowned performance artist told Shiota to stop working with yarn, and fully immersed herself in bootcamp-like performance classes with Abramovic. During this time, she gained a strong awareness of the body and its presence, and explored the notion of belonging. After this period, Shiota took up residence in Berlin, a place away from home that provided plenty of new inspiration and material for her art. It was here that her concept of “presence in absence”, which she explores in the majority of her work now, first took shape. She started creating installations that focused on the absence of the body, which helped her express her own sense of estrangement from her native country, as well as the impossibility of erasing the traces of memory from one’s skin. In the Brilliant Ideas profile, Shiota says:
Most of my work is about the memory in absent things. For example, a place where you feel the presence of somebody who’s been there recently. Nobody’s there – but their presence is there. A room with a memory.
Shiota works in an 800-square-metre studio in the east side of Berlin. She says that, although many people left East Berlin after the wall came down leaving many buildings empty, she still feels their presence, and says the buildings are “still breathing”. Wandering around East Berlin, she looked at windows on empty buildings and saw them as eyes. The artist started collecting the discarded windows during a time of redevelopment in Berlin and making artworks with them. Collecting around 2000 windows in total, she made a variety of installations that spoke of displacement. An example of one of these works she started making in 2004 is Inside – Outside (2009), which in its current form at the Mori includes 230 window frames. The first version was made in 2008, followed by many others. As the title also suggests, Shiota presents windows as boundaries between the inside and outside of private spaces, while also referencing the wall that once separated East and West Germany. Her installation gives what she calls an “in-between feeling”, as inside becomes outside and viceversa. Moreover, each windows has a story, which is still present within it.
The use of thread in her work has also a great significance, alongside the collection and use of found objects. Thread wraps things in a protective cocoon, and connects them to each other, but it also carries a darker reality, and like an impenetrable spiderweb, it traps things in an inestricable web. Shiota also reveals that “Red yarn is the red of blood. It’s also a symbol of relationships between people.” That red thread symbolises the unavoidable relations we have to each other. Black thread, on the other hand, symbolise the night sky, “the universe, the eternal black depth of infinity”, as she reveals.
When she moved to Berlin in the late 1990s, Shiota experienced a personal trauma that led her to create works that engaged with notions of life and death, impregnated with an atmosphere of darkness and mystery. At the time, she had been married for three years when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. The artist was “facing death”, as she recounts, and she started working with beds – recalling hospitals – and black yarn. In the installation During Sleep (2002), Shiota occupied an entire space with black yarn intricately woven like a spiderweb with numerous beds dotted around, onto which she and other women lay as if asleep. The bed is for the artist a symbol of the beginning and the end of life – the place where we are born and where we will eventually die.
Another work in the exhibition that addresses the concept of death is In Silence (2008), inspired by a memory of the next-door house burning down in the middle of the night when Shiota was a child in Japan. The installation features a burned piano and burnt chairs, all covered in black thread.
In 1999, Shiota returned to Japan for her first visit, and looking through her things, she discovered some old pairs of shoes that she could not fit anymore. This personal experience, seemingly insignificant and normal, gave her the inspiration to start collecting old shoes. She created works like Dreaming time (1999) in which she connected these shoes to each other with red thread, thinking about how humans could have an inherited DNA that makes them go back to their homeland. Objects for Shiota have a memory and have a life, they have a past that still lingers within them, and they all carry a story that, whether or not is known, we can still imagine. Suitcases seem to be a fit medium to symbolise a box full of memories, a storage place for things past and a means to transport one’s life to a new place.
In the 2016 installation Accumulation – Searching for the Destination, Shiota used around 430 oscillating suitcases connected with and hung by red thread. Shiota was inspired by the discovery of old newspapers in a suitcase she found in Berlin. Going back to her belief that all things have their own, innate memories, she used suitcases to explore notions of displacement, loss and memory, suggesting the memories, movement and migration of strangers, the refugee’s journey or the journeys of people’s lives. At the Mori, Shiota also displays some old suitcases filled with old photographs, memories of past lives. Carrying souvenirs into an uncertain future, the cases suggest a quest for the certainty of existence in a world where life is uncertain.
Her installation in the Japan Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale brought her red thread and particular work onto the wider international stage, consolidating her profile as an accomplished artist with a unique practice. Titled “Key in the Hand”, the exhibition featured old wooden boats installed in the pavilion, with red thread woven all around and over them, with old keys haging from the yarn and lying on the floor. The installation spoke of displacement, of relationships, and the keys that open one’s heart. The old Venetian boats were symbols for welcoming hands, inviting someone in. At the Mori, the first installation encountered upon entering the galleries recalls her Venice work. Entitled Uncertain Journey, the piece consists of the bare frames of boats arranged in a space covered in bright red threads. Here the boats are more abstract, and the work points to the encounters awaiting at the end of this uncertain journey that is life.
At the entrance to the exhibition, the 2019 installation Where Are We Going? picks up the motif of the boat, with 65 boats suspended from the 11-meter-high ceiling woven in white thread, this time inviting visitors to embark on a journey upon entering the museum.
During the time of transition in her practice, when she was experimenting with performance and developing what would become her main oeuvre employing thread, Shiota was focusing on the body, existence and belonging. Her distance from home, both physical and spiritual, drove her to explore notions of identity and the body. In addition to using her own body in performance, she introduced dresses in her installations for the first time. In After That (1999), she used 14-metre dresses covered in mud hanging from the ceiling, with showers dripping water over them, as an attempt to wash off the dirt. Shiota was suggesting how traces of our past, our origins, our belonging never can wash off the skin, hanging onto us like ghosts. At the same time, the empty dresses displayed a life of their own, and expressed the artist’s belief that objects and things will never shed the traces of memory and of those who have possessed them in the past.
At the Mori, Reflection of Space and Time (2018) features two dresses trapped in a woven black yarn cube. Dresses are not only carriers of past lives for Shiota, but are also symbols of the boundary between one’s personal interior and exterior. In the work, the two suspended dresses face a mirror that divides the space into two parts. The dresses, which seem to be facing each other, also face their own reflection. Inside the steel frame covered in black thread, the real dresses and the reflected ones all gain a physical presence of their own.
Since 2017, Shiota has been introducing body parts in her work, after she had a relapse into cancer and had to battle the disease once again. The Mori explains about her work Out of My Body:
Behind this was the experience of feeling that as she found herself on the treatment conveyor – having parts of her body removed, and undergoing chemotherapy – her soul was being left behind. For Shiota, who has always sensed the presence of life’s workings in absence, using her body as a work of art may involve imagining that absence.
In the Hand (2017) is a sculpture of a small child’s hands holding a fragile-looking object made of wire, which like her large installations, makes visible what is invisible, and expresses the “presence in absence” so dear to the artist. This small work seems to visually represent the artist’s own spirit, and all that is present in absence, recalling the exhibition title’s “trembling soul”.
C. A. Xuan Mai Ardia
“Shiota Chiharu: The Soul Trembles” is on view from 20 June to 27 October 2019 at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.