MAPPING MEMORIES: CHIHARU SHIOTA

Japanese-born artist Chiharu Shiota is best known for her large-scale yarn installations that transform a gallery space into an immersive environment. Over the past 25 years, Shiota’s works have been shown at more than 300 exhibitions around the world. Using a variety of media, her pieces explore existential questions surrounding life, death and the complex nature of human relationships.

Stepping into one of Chiharu Shiota’s striking installations is like entering an alternate reality: the materials and objects feel familiar, but the logic behind the intricate web structures seem to stem from an unknowable realm. Enveloped in an elaborate web of yarn, you’re left with a subtle, indescribable imprint on the body and mind.
Born in Osaka, Japan in 1972, Shiota studied oil painting at the Kyoto Seika University while working as an assistant to the artist and sculptor Saburo Muraoka. After studying abroad in Canberra, Australia, she moved to Germany in the mid-1990s to study under performance artist Marina Abramović and, subsequently, with visual artist Rebecca Horn. 

Early on in her career, Shiota felt limited by painting and lack of depth of the canvas. After having a dream where she was stuck inside a two-dimensional painting, the artist began working with her own body and experimenting with per-formances. This eventually led to her idiosyncratic three-dimensional mode of drawing that consists of using yarn to weave elaborate and seemingly never-ending webs in space, often interwoven with everyday objects charged with memories such as beds, shoes and suitcases.
For the 56th Venice Biennale, Shiota unveiled ‘The Key in the Hand' (2015), a piece created for the Japanese pavilion. In this installation, 180,000 keys gathered through an open call were suspended from dense webs of red yarn, which linked the gallery space to two wooden boats on the floor. A photograph of a child holding a key was displayed alongside four monitors featuring videos of young children talking about memories before and after they were born. For the artist, keys are a personal object that simultaneously keeps our space safe on a daily basis and has the potential to unlock doors to new, unknown worlds. The keys dangling from thousands of red strings evoked a sense of intercon-nectedness and expansiveness, allowing viewers to imbue their own memories and associations to the familiar everyday item. 

Color is a crucial element in Shiota’s works. Often red, black or white, the color of yarn used in her installations repre-sent different meanings. For instance, Shiota has said that red is the color of blood, which is connected to the body, family and human relationships. Meanwhile, in Japan, white is often used at funerals and symbolises death. For ‘Counting Memories’ (2019), an installation shown at Muzeum Śląskie in Katowice, Poland, the artist envisioned a network of black yarn extending from the ceiling to be a night sky, or a universe, filled with white numbers dotting the space like stars. The piece invited viewers to sit at desks (also entangled in black yarn) where they had the opportunity to answer questions and contemplate the significance of numbers in their lives: Numbers that have special meaning, numbers in the form of dates, numbers connected to personal histories. As with many of her works, the installation attempted to make visible the invisible threads shaping our inner and outer lives.
Shiota's largest solo exhibition to date debuted at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in 2019 and showcased her entire oeuvre for the first time. Titled ’Shiota Chiharu: The Soul Trembles’, the exhibition continues to tour and has made stops in South Korea and Taiwan. As Shiota's life changes, it seems her work and preoccupations have evolved with it. One thing that hasn't changed: she continues to be devoted to giving form to the unseeable auras and energies that colour our memories, dreams and inner cosmos. 

Text: Charmaine Li

Images: © Courtesy of Chiharu Shiota Studio