Chiharu Shiota

From Osaka to Berlin

Chiharu Shiota was born in Osaka in 1972. Her parents ran a business manufacturing wooden fish boxes, producing a thousand of them a day, and although they did not directly support her wish to become an artist they allowed her to study art formally. She enrolled at Kyoto Seika University, where she first worked under the contemporary sculptor Saburo Muraoka, and spent a period as an exchange student at the Canberra School of Art at the Australian National University. It was in Australia that she made Becoming Painting, which she counts as her first installation, covering her own body in red enamel paint. She has described taking part in it as an act of liberation, her first physical piece using her whole body rather than a display of skill. She went on to study at the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste in Braunschweig and then at the Universitat der Kunste in Berlin, where her teachers included Rebecca Horn and Marina Abramovic, an influence she has always acknowledged, and she was artist in residence at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. She has lived and worked in Berlin since the closing years of the last century.

Thread as a way of thinking

Shiota is best known for enormous webs of yarn or hose that fill a room and draw everyday objects into them. Her early pieces were performances, often surviving only as photographs and video, in which she used mud and, at times, menstrual blood as material. The later installations gather objects given to her by other people: beds, window frames, dresses, shoes, keys, suitcases and boats. Red thread stands for human relationships, black for the night and for anxiety, and thin plastic tubing filled with a blood like liquid suggests the umbilical support of a body. She has said that the crossing threads behave the way relationships do, tangling, loosening, being cut and coming under tension, which gives the long days of installation with her assistants a performative quality the audience never sees. Places matter to her: the thread works grew out of moving repeatedly between apartments and wanting to cover her possessions in yarn to mark a territory of her own. She has also worked with the choreographer Sasha Waltz and the composer Toshio Hosokawa, and cites Christian Boltanski as a source for the later installations.

A public career

She made her Japanese debut at the Yokohama Triennale in 2001 with Memory of Skin. The old windows she gathered from building sites in the former East Berlin became House of Windows, a fragile dwelling of roughly two hundred discarded frames, shown in her Berlin solo exhibition Raum in 2005 and later in Fukuoka. In 2015 she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale with The Key in the Hand, filling the pavilion with keys collected from strangers and two weathered boats. Her touring survey The Soul Trembles has since travelled from Brisbane in 2022 to the Grand Palais in Paris in 2024 and on to Montreal in 2026, while The Unsettled Soul opened at Kunsthalle Praha and Between Worlds at Istanbul Modern in 2024. For Manifesta 14 she hung hundreds of red threads from the ceiling of the Great Hammam of Pristina, a venue that counted more than one hundred and fifty thousand visitors. In 2026 the Southbank Centre in London presented Threads of Life. Alongside the installations she has kept up a practice of works on paper, and a pair of signed drawings in pastel, watercolour and thread, once handled by her Paris gallery, passed through Bonhams in Paris in 2021 for a high five figure sum in euros.