Chiharu Shiota

30.01.2015 - 05.04.2015

The Berlin-based Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota (b. 1972 in Osaka) creates capacious installations that surround the public like a mental space. The artist works with her own body and with personal found objects, such as clothing, shoes, dolls, and so on, which are woven into her installations. The most striking characteristic of her work results from a web of wool threads, which connect the space, the objects found in it, the performer, and the audience into a unity. Shiota is known internationally for these elaborate thread installations.

Next year she will represent her country in the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, thus receiving one of the highest honors on the art scene. Immediately before she appears before the world in Venice, the artist will be seen at the Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken with site-specific installations, sculptures, and drawings as well as painting and video. 

“Chiharu Shiota belongs to a generation of young artists who have attracted international attention in recent years for their art connected to the body. And yet Shiota’s works should be seen as being on the edge of current trends in recent Japanese art, which has enthusiastically embraced the electronic media of the high-tech world in order to reflect on the schismatic character of a culture based on a fantastic link of tradition and adaptation to a hypermodern world. Yet Shiota’s performances and installations can only be assigned to recent ‘Japanese’ art in a limited way and are also close to a much more broadly conceived tradition that began to take shape already in the late 1960s in Japan and the United States but above all in South America and Europe. Her training at German art schools under Marina Abramović since 1996 provides the real key to her visual idiom, which is unmistakably oriented around the solutions of the performance and installation art of the 1970s.” (Andrea Jahn)