Chiharu Shiota (b. 1972) is a Japanese performance and installation artist best known for creating room-filling, monumental yet delicate, poetic environments. Central to the artist’s work are the themes of remembrance and oblivion, dreaming and sleeping, traces of the past and childhood, and dealing with anxieties. Shiota finds diverse visual expressions for these subject matters, the most celebrated being impenetrable installations made of black thread which often enclose various household and everyday, personal objects: a burnt-out piano, a wedding dress, a lady’s mackintosh, sometimes even the sleeping artist herself. Stretched in multi-layers in the gallery space, these disorienting cocoons of black yarn arose from the artist’s desire to ‘draw in the air’ and represent physical anxieties the artist experienced. She says: ‘The creation with threads is a reflection of my own feelings. A thread can be replaced by feeling. If I weave something and it turns out to be ugly, twisted or knotted, then such must have been my feelings when I was working.’
Another body of work investigating physical and spatial perception are installations entirely made of window frames from Berlin, Germany. Shiota stacks the windows up to form a new architectural structure - they can become a house, a high tower, an architectural landscape, or arranged to remind us of empty frames in an artist studio. They were assembled by the artist on visits to demolition sites which, after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, emerged all over the city, dismantling and demolishing countless buildings. Those frames, those windows, were openings through which people living in the former East Berlin have looked and seen, in another time and space. Ingrained with memories of their previous owners, with thoughts of freedom, choice and liberation, they now act as traces, left-behind indications of what went before.
Shiota’s pictorial language unquestionably picks up the thread of installations and performances from the 1970s and the corresponding women artist’s generation. Her performances, where she explores her own physical endurance, take their bearings from Marina Abramovic’s work. Her analysis of physical and spatial perception feels close to the work of Rebecca Horn. Shiota spent several years training with both artists in Germany. Her implementation of used materials, of fabric and string, recall Louise Bourgeois or Eva Hesse, whose work also influenced Shiota to develop work around the theme of homeland, displacement and identity, which preoccupied Shiota ever since her move from Japan to Germany.
