中間內容區塊
Shiota Chiharu: The Soul Trembles
2021/05/01 - 2021/10/17

Shiota Chiharu: The Soul Trembles is the largest exhibition devoted to the Berlin-based, internationally active artist Shiota Chiharu. On display are some one hundred works ranging from her 1990s output to her latest pieces. In addition to large-scale installation, there are sculptures, performance videos, photographs, drawings, and materials related to her stage design projects. The exhibition marks the first time that her artistic career spanning some twenty-five years will be introduced in a comprehensive fashion.

Among these works are large-scale installations in which black and red threads run through and envelop the entire space, constituting one of her most representative artwork series. The countless lines traced out in thread allude to various phenomena and a complex array of links and connections, while also beckoning us towards the deepest reaches of existence. At the root of these works lie Shiota’s incessantly-pursued themes of life and death, as well as a fundamental inquiry into what we all pursue in life, and where we are heading.

The subtitle of this exhibition, “The Soul Trembles,” refers to the emotional stirrings of the heart that cannot be put into words, in addition to being a manifestation of thoughts the artist hopes to convey to others. In today’s contemporary age, everything changes at a rapid pace, and value systems are in constant flux: it can seem as if the firm and unyielding beliefs that society as a whole has relied upon are themselves being lost. Against this backdrop, the museum is hosting this exhibition in the belief that the keenly aware work of Shiota, which bears a relationship to essential, universal notions, is exceptionally significant in enabling us to question the world.

Artist
Shiota Chiharu

Shiota Chiharu was born in 1972 in Osaka Prefecture, and grew up in Kishiwada City. From 1992 to 1996, she studied oil painting at the Art Department of Kyoto Seika University, while also working as an assistant to Muraoka Saburo (1928-2013) in the Sculpture Department. During this time she studied abroad at the Australian National University School of Art in Canberra, and began making performances and installations. At the age of nineteen, she saw a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Shiga by the Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930-2017), which inspired Shiota to plan to go to Germany so that she could study under Abakanowicz. After a long and involved process, Shiota went to Europe in 1996 and enrolled at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg. She subsequently studied with the performance art pioneer Marina Abramovic (1946-) at the Braunschweig University of Art from 1997 to 1998, and then with Rebecca Horn (1944-) at Berlin University of the Arts. Since then, Shiota has been based in Berlin, actively showing her works at biennales and exhibitions at art museums and galleries. From 1993 up until 2021, she has exhibited at more than 300 solo shows, group exhibitions, biennales, and other events.

Shiota Chiharu,2021© Taipei Fine Arts Museum

Curator
Mami Kataoka

Mami Kataoka has been the director of Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, since 2020, previously serving as Chief Curator and curating numerous exhibitions including the Asian artists’ mid-career retrospectives Ai Weiwei: According to What? (2009/US Tour 2012-13), Lee Bul: From Me, Belongs to You Only (2012), Makoto Aida: Monument for Nothing (2012), and Lee Ming-wei and His Relations (2014-15). She was also international curator at the Hayward Gallery, London (2007-2009); co-artistic director for the 9th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2012); artistic director of the 21st Biennale of Sydney (2018); and artistic director of Aichi Triennale (2022). She has been a board member of the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art since 2014, and the president of CIMAM since 2020. She also served as an adjunct professor at Kyoto University of the Arts Graduate School; adjunct professor in the Graduate School of Fine Arts at Tokyo University of the Arts. Kataoka frequently writes and lectures about contemporary art, and serves on juries in Japan, Asia and beyond.

Photo: Ito Akinori,Photo courtesy: Mori Art Museum, Tokyo

Selected Artworks
 

Untitled
1992
Oil on canvas
166 x 134 cm

This work was made when Shiota was a first-year student at Kyoto Seika University. She recalls “challenging myself to make an abstract painting, even though we could choose whatever we wanted as a subject. All I could see on the surface of the canvas was color. The churning heart of this realm, deep inside the painting, disappeared from sight. I was frustrated with how technique took precedence, and with the lack of content. As I was handling these materials with an entire history behind them, this oil paint and canvas, I became no longer able to endure the frivolity with which I was painting.”

This was the last oil painting that Shiota would make.

Courtesy of the artist

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Untitled
One Line
1994
Performance, installation
(bean, paper, glue)
Australian National University School of Art, Canberra

Digital print
2019
49 x 70.5 cm / 78.5 x 49 cm
Photo:Ben Stone


Detail of One Line
1994
Bean on paper
16.5 x 11.5 cm

Shiota, who had already moved away from making paintings, found herself equally unable to paint where she was studying abroad in Australia. Even if she just drew a single line, she could not move her hand in response to the sense of order, space, and “breath” that ought to be there.

“I picked up the empty husks of beans that had fallen all over the schoolyard, pasted them onto a sheet of paper, and drew a single line. There, I found a certain joy in drawing a line without any technique.”

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One Line
Becoming Painting
1994
Performance, installation
(red enamel paint)
Australian National University School of Art, Canberra

Digital print
2019
166 x 110 / 72 x 48 cm x 6
Photo:Ben Stone

While at university, Shiota studied abroad in Australia on exchange. One night, sometime after she had abandoned making oil paintings, “I dreamed that I had become a painting. I found myself thinking, how should I move inside the pictorial surface so that this will turn out to be a good painting? Totally covered under all this oil paint on the surface, I found it hard to breathe. That night, I had become a part of the artwork.” Several days later, hanging the canvas onto the wall, she tried to become a painting by covering herself with enamel while wrapping herself around the canvas. For Shiota, this was “an act of liberation. This was the first artwork that was not a refined, polished art piece, but rather an act of bodily expression that I had thrown my entire self into.

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Becoming Painting
From DNA to DNA
1994
Performance, installation
(cardboard, fabric, wire, wool, acrylic paint)
Kyoto Seika University

Digital print
2019
72 x 48 cm x 2
Photo:Matsunaga Kayoko

“This was the first installation where I went in search of the materials myself. There is a certain sense of openness that jumps out into a non-two-dimensional space. I was born and emerged out of this work. How much does the transmission of DNA control what goes on in the head of the person creating the artwork? This was what went through my head at the time.”

This performance / installation held at Kyoto Seika University was also the first piece by Shiota that used yarn.

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From DNA to DNA
I Have Never Seen My Death
1997
Installation (bone, egg)
University of Fine Arts Hamburg, Germany

Digital print
2019
33 x 50 cm x 3
Photo: The artist

Congregation
1997
Performance, installation (bone, water)
Dorfpark, Buchholz, Germany

Digital print
2019
33 x 50 / 50 x 36 / 50 x 35 公分
Photo:Ben Stone

For an exhibition at University of Fine Arts Hamburg, Shiota collected cow jawbones from meat processing plants, carrying some 180 of them all by herself on the train in batches, spending each day for the next month and a half scraping the meat off the bones at the university in the middle of the night. These cow bones were first used in a work I Have Never Seen My Death where eggs were also used to signify a raw state. The phrase in the title is meant to resonate with the words carved into Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968): “besides, it’s always the others who die.”

In Congregation, the cow jawbones that symbolize death are arranged in a circular formation as if they were seeking life and drinking water. Shiota then held a performance with herself in the center, in which she seemed to be seeking life surrounded by muddy water — a gesture that resembled the act of returning to the earth.

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I Have Never Seen My Death / Congregation
After That
1999
Installation (dress, dirt, water)
Berlin University of the Arts, Germany

1999
Installation (dress, dirt, water)
E-Werk, Weimar, Germany

Digital print
2019
74 x 49 cm x 2

After That consisted of dresses measuring seven meters long that Shiota had sewn herself and covered in mud: they hung in front of a wall, while water flowed continuously from a shower installed above. “The dresses express the absence of the body. No matter how many times they are washed, the memory of one’s skin can never be washed away.” Subsequently, this work was shown at the “1st Yokohama Triennale” under the title Memory of Skin. This large scale installation, where water cascades down onto thirteen meter-long dresses stained with mud, made the reputation of the then twenty-nine year old Shiota among the Japanese art community.

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After That
Dialogue from DNA
2004
Installation (old shoe, red wool)
Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology, Krakow, Poland

Digital print
2019
49 x 74 cm x 3
Photo:Sunhi Mang

 

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Dialogue from DNA
Installation view: Shiota Chiharu: The Soul Trembles, 2021.
Photo courtesy: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Photo: Guan-Ming Lin
Installation view: Shiota Chiharu: The Soul Trembles, 2021.
Photo courtesy: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Photo: Guan-Ming Lin
Installation view: Shiota Chiharu: The Soul Trembles, 2021.
Photo courtesy: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Photo: Guan-Ming Lin
Installation view: Shiota Chiharu: The Soul Trembles, 2021.
Photo courtesy: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Photo: Guan-Ming Lin
Installation view (Stage Design Projects): Shiota Chiharu: The Soul Trembles, 2021.
Photo courtesy: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Photo: Guan-Ming Lin
Installation view (Stage Design Projects): Shiota Chiharu: The Soul Trembles, 2021.
Photo courtesy: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Photo: Guan-Ming Lin
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