塩田千春

Shiota Chiharu is known internationally for installations in which a large volume of red or black thread is strung dynamically through space. Her concerns spring from deeply personal experience, yet through distillation of these concerns into universal questions of life, death, and existence, “I” becomes “we,” and her work has moved numerous people across boundaries of culture, society, language, and history. Born in 1972 in Suita, Osaka, Shiota grew up in a traditional patriarchal household where, as a woman, she was not expected to carry on the family business. She questioned the irrationality of the values imposed on women, and began to reflect on her own life choices and the meaning of existence. As a child, she visited her grandparents in Kochi Prefecture, and while pulling weeds at the graves of ancestors interred in the earth, she experienced fear of death for the first time. The earth and soil, as both the origin of life and the place where the dead are laid to rest, would become key elements in Shiota’s later practice. She began attending a local painting class, and by the age of twelve was conscious of wanting to become an artist. In 1992 she enrolled in the Faculty of Art at Kyoto Seika University. She soon found herself troubled, however, by what she felt to be the tenuous connection between painting and her own existence, and was unable to continue with the medium. In 1994, while studying at Australian National University, she had a dream in which she became a painting, and from this emerged the performance “Becoming Painting,” in which she poured red paint over her sheet-draped body. Around the same time she created “Accumulation” (1994), in which black yarn threaded through acorns was woven into geometric forms in a gallery space, as though drawing in three dimensions. These experiments abroad saw her practice expand from the canvas into three-dimensional space. After returning to Japan, she studied under the contemporary artist Muraoka Saburō (1928–2013), whose career-long engagement with issues of life and death in his work helped cultivate Shiota’s awareness of materials as a means of probing the very roots of being. In 1996, Shiota moved to Germany and began studying under Marina Abramović (b. 1946) at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts (HFBK Hamburg). Working with large quantities of cattle bones obtained from a slaughterhouse and with eggs as symbols of life, she staged exhibitions both in and outside the university that confronted human existence and mortality through performances in which she buried her own body in soil. During a workshop led by Abramović in the south of France that involved a week of fasting, Shiota staged the performance “Try and Go Home” (1997), which gave voice to a conflict she carried as a woman who had left her home country: a longing to return, and at the same time resistance to patriarchy that made return feel impossible. In this work she repeatedly climbed in and out of a hole on a slope, her body caked in soil. The piece later developed into a series of mud-based performances, videos, and installations that addressed skin color as a marker of identity. In 1997 she relocated to Berlin. At the first Yokohama Triennale in 2001, Shiota presented “Memory of Skin,” an installation comprising five mud-stained dresses each fourteen meters in length that established her reputation in Japan. The dresses served as surrogates for her body, which had played a central role in her earlier performances, and Shiota refers to them as a “second skin.” Gradually, means of conveying presence without the physical body became her central concern. Bodily absence is itself a harbinger and symbol of death, and in her continuing exploration of being and meaning, Shiota pursued evocations of the invisible, memory, or the presence of the soul. Her installations came to incorporate hospital beds suggesting birth and death, dreaming and waking; burnt pianos and chairs; disused shoes and secondhand suitcases; and window frames salvaged from construction sites in the former East Berlin. Her method of organizing an entire space around a single material, deployed in overwhelming volume, became an increasingly defining aspect of her work. The thread-based installations that have become synonymous with Shiota today can be traced from “Accumulation” in 1994 to a 1999 work in which thread connected an entire space to her own bed, then to an exhibition in 2000 linking multiple beds with black thread, and further to “In Silence” (2002), in which a burnt piano and chairs are bound together by black thread. In 2005 Shiota was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and after the removal of one ovary gave birth to her first daughter in 2007. This direct confrontation with both death and life in her own body marked a turning point, as her work shifted in orientation “from death toward life.” In 2015 she represented Japan in the national pavilion at the Venice Biennale, though the years leading up to it had brought further hardship, including miscarriage and the death of her father. “The Key in the Hand,” which emerged from her ordeals, trauma, and resilience, drew widespread acclaim: 50,000 keys, collected from people around the world who had gripped them over and over, hung from the ends of red threads, while 130,000 more were placed inside and on the floor around two boats that had been used in Venice. The boats in “The Key in the Hand” were reimagined in “Uncertain Journey” (2016) as six abstract vessels rendered only in black steel outlines, with red thread erupting from them to fill the space to the ceiling. The work gave overwhelming physical form to the uncertainty and anxiety of an unseen future, at once personal and universal, in a world gripped by continuing turmoil. In 2019 the Mori Art Museum staged “Shiota Chiharu: The Soul Trembles,” a major solo exhibition surveying twenty-five years of her practice. Just as preparations began, however, Shiota’s ovarian cancer returned, and she found herself planning the exhibition and conceiving new works while undergoing surgery and treatment. Working in the shadow of her own mortality, she brought to the work a set of relationships that were felt and lived rather than merely conceived: the physical body and emotion, the body lost after death and the soul set free, the body as microcosm and the universe as macrocosm. This projection of actual experiences and emotions added weight that anchored the work. New works incorporated materials she had not previously used, including glass and cowhide, and from this period emerged series of three-dimensional works evoking the form of cells. “The Soul Trembles” went on to tour six major museums across the Asia-Pacific region, before and after the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, before traveling to the Grand Palais in Paris and the Museum of Oriental Art in Turin, among other venues, and an audience of millions witnessed the arc of her art’s development. During the pandemic she returned to drawing in earnest, and alongside her large-scale installations and sculptural work, her practice continues to expand in ever more varied directions. (Kataoka Mami / Translated by Christopher Stephens) (Published online: 2026-04-24)