Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, July 6, 2022: Chiharu Shiota, a Japanese performance and installation artist. (#1614)

Wednesday, July 6, 2022

Artist of the Day, July 6, 2022: Chiharu Shiota, a Japanese performance and installation artist. (#1614)

Chiharu Shiota (1972) is a Japanese performance and installation artist. Educated in Japan, Australia, and Germany, Shiota interweaves materiality and the psychic perception of the space to explore ideas around the body and flesh, personal narratives that engage with memory, territory, and alienation. Her signature installations, which consist of dazzling, intricate networks of threads stretching across gallery rooms, made the artist rise to fame in the 2000s. Shiota has exhibited worldwide and represented Japan in the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.

Confronting fundamental human concerns such as life, death and relationships, Shiota explores human existence throughout various dimensions by creating an existence in the absence either in her large-scale thread installations that include a variety of common objects and external memorabilia or through her drawings, sculptures, photography and videos.

Shiota was born in Osaka. Her parents ran a business manufacturing fish boxes, producing a thousand wooden boxes a day. She wanted to be an artist since she was twelve. Although her parents didn't directly support her desire to be an artist and worried about her, she was able to formally study art. She studied at the Kyoto Seika University in Kyoto from 1992 to 1996, was an exchange student at Canberra School of Art, Australian National University, 1993-93 and a student at Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Braunschweig, from 1997 to 1999 and at Universität der Künste, Berlin, from 1999 to 2003.

In an interview with Andrea Jahn, Shiota mentions that her first installation work was Becoming Painting, which was created with red enamel paint she used on her body. "Taking part in Becoming Painting was indeed an act of liberation. It was my first physical piece of work, using my whole body, rather than a skillful artwork." In Berlin, she was a student of Rebecca Horn and in Braunschweig studied with Marina Abramović.

Shiota's oeuvre links various aspects of art performances, sculpture and installation practices. Mostly renowned for her vast, room-spanning webs of threads or hoses, she links abstract networks with concrete everyday objects such as keys, window frames, dresses, shoes, boats and suitcases. Her early works are performance pieces, many of which were recorded in photographs and video, in which, for example, she uses mud, while later large-scale installations integrate personal objects (e.g. shoes) given to her by other people. Materials and colors carry particular meanings in her artistic work, in which menstruation blood is used as artistic material and red threads come to signify human relationships. Shiota acknowledges her teacher Marina Abramovic's influence during her formative years and refers to Christian Boltanski's work as a source of inspiration for some of her later installation works. Places matter to her work and she is strongly interested in psychogeography, the relationship between psyche and space. Shiota's thread installation works developed from the artist's experience of moving between places out of which evolved the desire to cover her possessions in yarn thereby marking a personal territory. In an interview she states that she could not have made her large-scale installations, A Room of Memory (2009) and Memory of Skin (2005), without living in Berlin.

Arriving in Berlin in 1999, Shiota witnessed a Berlin with lingering Cold War ideological and cultural relics at the turn of the millennium. With the political tension gradually weakening, Berlin had transformed itself into a major economic and commercial center. Although equally fascinated by the forward-moving scenes and the renewal of the urban landscape, Shiota turned to look at the historic, abandoned part of the city. Over several years, the artist collected hundreds of old windows from construction sites in former East Berlin out of her curiosity of how residents from the two sides viewed each other’s way of life. House of Windows (2005), shown at Shiota’s solo exhibition Raum at Haus am Lützowplatz in Berlin and later at the 3rd Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, presents a delicate assemblage of approximately two hundred disposed windows in the shape of a house. Equating windows as skin that divides the flesh and the outer world, Shiota explores the physical boundaries that stood in the fast-changing urban realm and draws a parallel between that and the body and therefore, interpersonal boundaries. Personally, as still a new transplant to Berlin, Shiota moved frequently from one place to another and dislocation has become an inherent part of her life. Thus, through the creation of works such as House of Windows, Shiota probes into the in-betweenness as she was feeling culturally and artistically distant to both her home country and current place of residence. Standing as an extremely fragile dwelling, House of Windows evokes the liminal boundaries between the personal and the historical through visual narratives embedded in used objects.

Since the 2000s, Shiota continues to produce cobweb-like installations at institutions worldwide, which became her signature set of works. These installations vary significantly from one to another, fitting the scale of the gallery rooms and incorporating found objects of various kinds. In creating the work at each exhibiting venue, Shiota often engages with the symbolism and stories contained in used objects that she was able to collect. The objects range from beds (Breathing from Earth, During Sleep, One Place, Traces of Memory,

Dresses indicate a second skin, a divide between the self and the world. The curved contours of keys resemble those of the human body. The bodily contact that all of these above objects carries constitutes numerous lived experiences that intrigues the artist. In Shiota’s constructions, the red or black strings stretches from, reaches, surrounds, connects, encloses, and obscures the collected objects in varying ways. At each installation, Shiota and her assistants would spend hours straight in completing the work. The artist views the crisscrossing threads as human relationships that would get tangled, cut, loosened or charged with tension, and these experiences are constantly present in the creation processes of the artist, which adds a layer of performative nature to Shiota’s work that is often unseen to the audience.

In the recent decade, Shiota has created large-scale installations that evoke the lived experiences of women. In Dialogue with Absence (2010), an oversized white wedding dress is hung high up on the wall. On the ground lays several peristaltic pumps, from where red liquid depart and reach the dress via numerous plastic tubes attached onto the dress. This part-medical, part-ghostly scene poses questions about womanhood. The dress seems to embody an ideal version of a married woman, who is drained by societal burdens. The injection of the blood could also suggest that societal expectations are fed to her continuously. A disturbing, nightmare-like composition, Dialogue may also be autobiographical, pointing to the artist’s own battling with cancer.

She now lives and works in Berlin
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