--- title: "Chiharu Shiota: results at LLB Auction" source: LLB Auction canonical: "https://www.llb-auction.com/artists/chiharu-shiota" currency: EUR price_basis: "hammer, excluding buyer's premium and VAT" scope: results at this auction house only --- # Chiharu Shiota LLB Auction has offered 2 lots by Chiharu Shiota since May 2026 and sold one for a hammer price of €7,000. | Fact | Value | |---|---| | Born | 1972 | | Lots offered at LLB Auction | 2 | | Lots sold | 1 | | Range of prices realised | €7,000 to €7,000 | | Median price realised | €7,000 | ## Lots | Work | Medium | Sale | Date | Estimate | Hammer | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | Open Journey | Pastel, watercolour and thread on paper | The August Edit | 25 August 2026 | €6,000 to €12,000 | €7,000 | | Endless Line | Mixed media | Contemporary Art Spring 2026 | 26 May 2026 | €45,000 to €65,000 | Not sold | ## About 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. ## Market at LLB Auction | Figure | Value | |---|---| | Share sold | 50% | | Record hammer | €7,000 (Open Journey) | | Hammer vs low estimate | 1.17x | | Lots above high estimate | 0 | ### Prices by medium | Medium | Offered | Sold | Lowest hammer | Median hammer | Highest hammer | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | Mixed Media | 1 | 0 | | | | | Pastel, Watercolour And Thread On Paper | 1 | 1 | €7,000 | €7,000 | €7,000 | ### Year by year | Year | Offered | Sold | Total hammer | |---|---|---|---| | 2026 | 2 | 1 | €7,000 | ## Public auction records Other auction houses published these results, cited from the linked sources. They are separate from the results of LLB Auction. | House | Date | Work | Price (basis) | Source | |---|---|---|---|---| | Bonhams | 14 December 2021 | | €37,813 (premium) | https://www.bonhams.com/auction/27427/lot/43/chiharu-shiota-born-1972-drawing-22-sans-titre-deux-oeuvres-2009-2010/ | ## Career ### Exhibitions | Exhibition | Venue | Year | |---|---|---| | Memory of Skin, Yokohama Triennale | Yokohama Triennale | 2001 | | Raum | Haus am Lutzowplatz | 2005 | | Dialogue with Absence | Galerie Christophe Gaillard | 2010 | | Wall | Kenji Taki Gallery | 2010 | | The Key in the Hand, Japanese Pavilion | Biennale di Venezia | 2015 | | The Soul Trembles | Gallery of Modern Art | 2022 | | Artistic Intervention, Great Hammam of Pristina, Manifesta 14 | Great Hammam of Pristina | 2022 | | The Unsettled Soul | Kunsthalle Praha | 2024 | | Between Worlds | Istanbul Modern | 2024 | | The Soul Trembles | Grand Palais | 2024 | | Chiharu Shiota: Threads of Life | Southbank Centre | 2026 | | The Soul Trembles | Montreal Museum of Fine Arts | 2026 | ## Questions ### How many works by Chiharu Shiota has LLB Auction sold? Between May 2026 and August 2026, LLB Auction sold 1 of the 2 lots by Chiharu Shiota it offered (50%). ### What is the record price for Chiharu Shiota at LLB Auction? The record is €7,000 for Open Journey, in the sale The August Edit of 25 August 2026, against an estimate of €6,000 to €12,000. ### Do works by Chiharu Shiota sell above their estimate at LLB Auction? 0 of the 1 lots sold went above their high estimate. On average the hammer reached 1.17 times the low estimate. ### Do these prices include the buyer’s premium? The prices on this page are hammer prices, before the buyer’s premium and VAT. The results page of each sale gives the price with premium of every lot sold. ### How do I get a valuation of a work by Chiharu Shiota? Send photos of the work, of its signature and of any certificate through the valuation form. Lyna Brahami compares it with the results of Chiharu Shiota at the house and replies free of charge within 48 working hours. ## Sources - LLB Auction catalogue (Proprietary) ## Valuations Request a free valuation: https://www.llb-auction.com/sell