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Chiharu Shiota
Japan, 1972
Heir of Ana Mendieta and a whole generation of feminist artists form the early 70’s, Shiota works with her body as an intervention space, realizing performances that deal with our link with the earth, the past and the memory.
Well known for her installations with thread as main material, her symmetric tangles captivate the spectator at first sight, creating feelings that go between safety and fear, fascination and ugliness, while awakening memories, and both absence and existence as philosophical matters.
The presence and absence of her body is the thread running through her work, and ultimately is what makes it possible to understand her confrontation with the question of defining the artwork, the artistic subject and the public, the interior and exterior space.
In Shiota’s philosophy the true artwork is created only when the expectations for familiar artistic forms of expression are abandoned in favor of a perception of things that get by without any attributions of meaning.
She has exhibited at institutions such as Gropius Bau, Mori Art Museum, Jameel Art Centre, Gottesborg Museum, The Art Gallery of South Australia, Louisiana Museum, Kiasma, Hayward Gallery, Fundación Sorigué, Palazzo Reale Milano, The Museum of Kyoto, Maison Rouge, MONA Museum, and Mattress Factory, among others.
She represented Japan at the 56th edition of the Venice Biennale. Additionally, she has designed the scenography for the opera Matsukaze alongside Sasha Waltz and for Tristan and Isolde at KielTeater.
Her work is part of collections such as the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Fundación Sorigué, Centre Georges Pompidou, and Kiasma, among others.
CHIHARU SHIOTA–塩田千春 official web page
Grand Palais, Paris
Chiharu Shiota
The Soul Trembles*
As a preview to the reopening of all its galleries in June 2025, the Grand Palais is presenting an exhibition devoted to the poetic and sensitive work of Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota.
Born in Osaka in 1972 and now living in Berlin, Chiharu Shiota is internationally renowned for her monumental installations made of intertwined woollen threads. These gigantic canvases are often wrapped around everyday objects, taking viewers on a majestic dreamlike journey. Her protean creations explore notions of temporality, movement, memory and dreams, and require both the mental and physical involvement of the viewer.
Co-organised with Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, this exhibition is the largest ever devoted to the artist in France. Spread over more than 1,200 square metres, it offers a truly sensitive experience. Featuring seven large-scale installations, sculptures, photographs, drawings, performance videos and archival documents relating to his staging project, the exhibition provides an opportunity to familiarise oneself with Shiota’s career, which spans more than twenty years.
This exhibition is co-organised by the GrandPalaisRmn, Paris and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.
Curated by:
Mami Kataoka, Director of the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
Chiharu Shiota
An Unknown Journey CS/D 250201
2025
Oilstick, watercolor and thread on paper
25 x 20 x 3 cm
Chiharu Shiota
An Unknown Journey CS/D 250204
2025
Oilstick, watercolor and thread on paper
20 x 25 x 3 cm
Chiharu Shiota
An Unknown Journey CS/D 250203
2025
Oilstick, watercolor and thread on paper
25 x 20 x 3 cm
Chiharu Shiota
An Unknown Journey CS/D 250202
2025
Oilstick, watercolor and thread on paper
25 x 20 x 3 cm
Chiharu Shiota
Connected to the Universe CS/D240512
2024
Thread on canvas
41,3 x 30,1 cm
The Soul´s Journey exhibition in Fundación Calosa, México
To experience art is to embark the soul on a journey, to explore the depths of human consciousness. As visitors
visitors tour the exhibition at CALOSA Foundation, they will engage with various works of art that grapple with life,
death and connection. The purpose of art is to look beyond our mundane lives.
When I was studying to become a painter, I felt trapped on the canvas because everything I created felt as if it had been done before.
had already been done before. It was only when I started working with thread that I found my own medium by extending the line of the canvas into the third dimension. the third dimension. The use of thread allows me to explore breath and space. As the accumulation of threads forms a surface a surface, I have the sensation of drawing in the air.
In the installation ‘The Soul’s Journey’, a human figure lies beneath an immense pattern: its age, nationality or gender are not discernible, but its presence is perceptible, but its presence is undeniable. It is a visual representation of human existence or of an inner universe trying to connect with the universe that tries to connect with the outside. This vast pattern, present both in the installation and in my drawings, resembles an organic shape resembles an organic form similar to the cells of our body, symbolising a universe that envelops and connects us.
I believe that all life is interrelated since living in society means being connected to others; survival without connection is impossible.
without connection is impossible.
After years of creating installations in space with thread, I returned to canvases when I discovered how to bring a part of this universe to the canvas;the network of threads spreads over the surface of the painting like a skin. I understood that there is no difference between three-dimensional space and the canvas because a single line of thread is like a line in a painting: it has no end.
As we look outward to the universe outside, questioning our existence and purpose in life, we also look inward.
inward. The house is a protected and enclosed space, much like the womb, symbolic of the beginning of life and connection.
connection.
Although normally the blood remains inside the body, the red sculpture becomes a manifestation of the body from the inside out.
The house has been transformed into a drawing within the space that exposes a rich pattern of connections. This house symbolises the richness of the human inner life, a home that resides deep within us.
– Chiharu Shiota
Chiharu Shiota
Connected to the Universe [CS/D 241127]
2024
Thread on canvas
41,3 x 30,1 cm
Chiharu Shiota
Connected to the Universe
2024
Water-soluble wax pastel, ink and thread on paper
27,5 x 41,5 cm
Chiharu Shiota
Connected to the Universe
2024
Water-soluble wax pastel, ink and thread on paper
42 x 30 cm
Chiharu Shiota. Everyone, a Universe in Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona
22 March – 23 June, 2024
Curator: Imma Prieto
Poetics of the thread that the body breathes
Creating spaces within spaces, establishing a dialogue with the specific architecture of each place with a single objective: to evoke deep emotions and reflections on life, time, memory and identity. Chiharu Shiota (Osaka, 1972) creates installations that are intimately rooted in structures already imbued with other people’s stories. With her immersive and deeply poetic art, she invites us to explore the mysteries of the universe and the human soul, emphasising the dichotomy between life and death. In fact, it is from the binomial eros-thanatos that three of the concepts that structure the exhibition Everyone, a Universe unfold: memory, object and body.
This is how memory becomes essential to knowing who we are and where we come from, a memory that can be revealed through interaction with certain objects. Equally, it is in the body where the traces of what causes the presence of memory are collected; or its traumatic absence. Shiota’s installations are social, political and poetic invocations in which individual and collective claims converge.
The entire installation becomes a space for reflection and knowledge, opening windows to a past that is ours, from the present and with the intent of facing a conscious future. At the heart of Shiota’s work lies thread, a seemingly simple yet powerfully symbolic element that becomes the medium through which the artist weaves her visual narratives. Her intricate webs of thread, stretching across the space like constellations in the night sky, remind us of the complexity of human relationships and the interconnectedness of our individual lives. Each thread, each node, carries the story of an encounter, an experience, an emotion, all of them intertwined with the others to form a tapestry of shared memory. It is necessary to pay attention to the colour, to the reddish colour of the threads that evoke blood. The frameworks generated by her installations become the circulation of blood and/or neuronal connections, invoking life, a world of possibilities.
In her installations, Shiota uses everyday domestic objects such as beds, chairs and clothing to create evocative landscapes imbued with a sense of intimacy and vulnerability. These objects, impregnated with the footprint of human life, become symbols of our earthly existence, reminding us of the fragility and transience of life. Wrapped in Shiota’s webs of thread they take on a new dimension of meaning, inviting us to reflect on our own experience of the world and our connection to others. Taking memory as her recurring theme, Shiota has spent much of her artistic career exploring how individual and collective memories shape our identity and perception of the world. In many of her installations she uses personal objects, such as letters, photographs and toys, to evoke past memories and experiences. Caught in the webs of thread, these objects become tangible vestiges of memory, reminding us of the importance of remembering and honouring our past. Shiota’s performances are acts of pure poetry in motion, in which the artist becomes the instrument of expression. Through simple and repetitive gestures, such as weaving and unravelling threads, she takes us on a journey of introspection and transformation, where time fades away and space becomes a blank canvas for the exploration of the human soul.
Each action is one of creation and destruction, a reminder of the ephemeral nature of life, where the eternal search for meaning in a changing world becomes neverending movement. Viewers must allow themselves to become part of the installation, to carry out the performative action, such that our presence comes into play with the cosmogony of threads causing memories to emerge. Shiota’s art, with its deep emotional resonance and its timeless beauty, reminds us of the human capacity to create moments in which we experience deep meanings and atavistic connections. Within the spaces she inhabits, every gesture becomes movement and stands against today’s world, a world marked by uncertainty and transience, by emptiness and superficiality.
Chiharu Shiota is an artist whose work transcends the boundaries of time and space, inviting us to explore the unknown mysteries of our psyche, of our subconscious minds, through a deeply moving artistic and poetic expression. With each installation and performance (whether hers or made by us transiting the space), she reminds us of the beauty and fragility of our existence and invites us to contemplate the universe within us.
Her art has the capacity to evoke deep emotions and reflections on life and death, and it does so with subtlety and forcefulness, so that through this natural contradiction we come close to a thread, just one thread, a line that communicates and connects one with the universe. Thousands of connections generating moments of knowledge. Individual and collective memories of unknown times and spaces that are nevertheless our own.
In her installations we can feel life and death beating: they recall images and words, neuronal connections through which thousands of information units circulate, personal, specific and unique, yet common to us all. And it is in these shared spaces that the nodules become a creative force, but above all a caring and welcoming force. Their red filaments could be cracks from which life seeps, full of referential symbols, such as the landscape of empty, joined chairs that the artist presents on this occasion, or the skin that takes root through their metallic feet.
As stated earlier, with this exhibition we delve into the most relevant binomials for human beings, the life-death or eros-thanatos dichotomy, which is essential for approaching Shiota’s work, but also that of Antoni Tàpies. At the same time, recognising it as one of the most quintessential ontological questions, we deem it necessary to open this space for reflection given the importance that memory holds in our lives.
– Imma Prieto
Chiharu Shiota
Connected to the Universe
2024
Water-soluble wax pastel, ink and thread on paper
41 x 28,2 cm
Chiharu Shiota
Connected to the Universe
2024
Water-soluble wax pastel, ink and thread on paper
29,8 x 41,2 cm
Chiharu Shiota
Connected to the Universe
2024
Water-soluble wax pastel, ink and thread on paper
41,2 x 29,8 cm
Chiharu Shiota
Connected to the Universe
2024
Water-soluble wax pastel, ink and thread on paper
42,5 x 30,2 cm
Chiharu Shiota
Connected to the Universe
2024
Water-soluble wax pastel, ink and thread on paper
29,5 x 41,5 cm
Chiharu Shiota
State of Being (Clocks)
2024
Metal frame, thread, pocket watches
45 x 45 x 80 cm
Chiharu Shiota
Out Of My Body [CS/I 240201]
2024
Cowhide leather, rope
Dimensions variable
Beyond Consciousness – Exposition Chiharu Shiota
Internationally-renowned Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota has been invited by the city’s Department of Art and History Museums to live in the Pavillon de Vendôme and Tapisseries museums, as well as the Visitation chapel.
Chiharu Shiota’s works are ephemeral, but they aim to leave a lasting impression. The artist creates immersive installations in which an entire space is criss-crossed by threads, usually black or red, colours which, according to the artist, can be associated with the night sky or the cosmos in the case of the former, and with blood or the red thread of destiny in the Asian mentality in the case of the latter.
The exhibition spaces host existing works and new creations created in situ, which engage in a dialogue with the architecture and history of the site in question.
‘This exhibition explores the human condition and what lies behind it. In my work, I try to find meaning in life, connection and death. I draw on my emotions and experiences, but it’s not just about me. Our memories are a crucial part of our identity. It’s the importance of memory that tells us who we are, what we’ve done with our lives and who we’ve connected with. While our brains hold a personal and intimate collection of memories, this collection is unknown to others until you share your experience and feelings with them.’
– Chiharu Shiota
Chiharu Shiota
Endless Line [CS/C 241109]
2024
Metal frame, suitcases and thread
160 x 140 cm
Chiharu Shiota
Cell [CS/S 240202]
2024
Glass, metal wire
27.5 x 17.5 x 11 cm
Chiharu Shiota
Cell [CS/S 240203]
2024
Glass, metal wire
28.8 x 19.3 x 7.8 cm
Chiharu Shiota
Cell [CS/S 240204]
2024
Glass, metal wire
26.6 x 28 x 21 cm
Chiharu Shiota
Cell [CS/S 240205]
2024
Glass, metal wire
32 x 27.4 x 17.5 cm
Chiharu Shiota
Cell [CS/S 240206]
2024
Glass, metal wire
41 x 27.5 x 26 cm
«A TIDE OF EMOTIONS» EXHIBITION BY ARTIST CHIHARU SHIOTA
From October 4th, 2023, Vincom Center for Contemporary Art (VCCA) will open the exhibition » A Tide of Emotions,» introducing the installation of Japanese female artists to the Vietnamese public. Chiharu Shiota is one of the world’s leading names in conceptual art.
Chiharu Shiota is among the most active and successful contemporary artists in the world today, whose works have been displayed in many prestigious museums and exhibitions in the region. She was chosen as the artist representing Japan at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), one of the oldest and most reputable international art events in the world, held every two years in Venice, Italy. Chiharu Shiota is well known for her spectacular and elaborate large-scale installations, meticulously and skillfully woven from hundreds of thousands of threads, usually occupying entire spaces.
The exhibition «A Tide of Emotions» includes completely new works made at VCCA. Notably, the main work with the same title covers VCCA’s massive space with a network of red threads, which are the representative material of the artist, linked to the wooden boats on the floor. Coming to the exhibition, the audience will enter a surreal space, connecting with a world full of memories and emotions.
Shiota’s works are a convergence of beauty in both form and content, both making a strong visual impression and containing countless layers of deep meaning within. «A Tide of Emotions,» which bears a relationship to essential, universal notions, will become a significant place for everyone and enable them to see the world in a different way.
Chiharu Shiota
Connected to the Universe CS/D 230213
2023
Water-soluble wax pastel, ink and thread on paper
21 x 30 cm
Chiharu Shiota
Endless Line
2023
Thread on canvas
140 x 240 cm
Chiharu Shiota
Endless Line [CS/C 220714]
2022
Thread on canvas
180 x 120 cm
Chiharu Shiota
“Sincronizando hilos y rizomas” from 23 of october 2012 till 30 of march of 2013
Casa Asia presents the first exhibition of Chiharu Shiota (Osaka, 1972) in Barcelona, with a proposal consisting of several installations, drawings and videos, which are integrated into a single project displayed at its headquarters in dialogue with the old domestic uses of the Baró de Quadras Palace, by putting into practice the creation of spaces of their own, which make visible the invisible threads that link us to things.The synchronisation of threads in operating systems has its origin in a process by which a thread can create other threads within the same system.
In his work, these threads are veins through which tears, the fear of the abyss, life and death circulate; threads that carry particular and universal stories, intertwining like the inverted roots of a tree, like a rhizome through multiple ramifications that hinder the relationship between the self and the world. The threads transport information and are essential in all communication, but at the same time they form networks or barbed wire fences that block the passage of strangers in a kind of space where everyday life conflicts with desiring production.
Chiharu Shiota
Cell
2020
Watercolor, crayon and thread on paper
24 x 17 cm
Chiharu Shiota
State of Being
2019
Thread on metal
35 x 62 x 134 cm
Chiharu Shiota
State of Being (Spiral)
2017
Metal, thread
56 x 57 x 26 cm
Chiharu Shiota
Falling CS140114D
2014
Oilstick, watercolor and ink
40 x 30 cm
Chiharu Shiota
Red Mask CS140113D
2014
Oilstick, watercolor and ink
40 x 30 cm
Chiharu Shiota
Red Line XIII
2012
Oil and pastel on paper
150 x 100 cm
Chiharu Shiota
Red Line XII
2012
Oil and pastel on paper
136 x 200 cm
Chiharu Shiota
Red Line XVI
2012
Oil and pastel on paper
150 x 100 cm
CHIHARU SHIOTA
«EARTH AND BLOOD» in Gallery Nieves Fernández in Madrid, February 2014
Chiharu Shiota, Osaka 1972, presents in this new exhibition a series of works that explores her relationship with nature, and her body. The exhibitions consist in a video installation with six works and a thread installation with a dress, sign for her of a second skin. In her work, Chiharu Shiota uses thread, broken windows, old clothes and shoes… If these objects create a disturbing feeling, they also revive memories of the past that we have been accumulating during years.
Well known for her installations with thread as main material, Chiharu makes them as symbols of what we are and the things we belong to, creating an oppressive atmosphere. Always seen at first sight, her installations locate us in a dreamful place, where we develop a certain state of anxiety.
Trying to get over a miscarriage, the artist went back to work with earth as a basic material.
“With the deadline of the exhibition I thought ‘Do I really have to make Works when I feel like this? But then the title Earth and Blood came to me and I was helplessly overcome by a torrent of sadness anger and anxiety. At the end I show some extremely dark videos and drawings. I wanted to make something that conceal my feelings but I simply couldn’t hide».
Chiharu Shiota has exhibited in Maison Rouge, Paris, Mona Museum for Old and Modern Art, Tasmania, Matress Factory in Pittsburgh, The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo…She has also participated in exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery in London, the Kiasma in Helsinki, Casa Encendida in Madrid, the Louisiana Museum as well as in the Biennials of Venice, Lyon and Moscow.
