Preface

Internationally acclaimed artist Shiota Chiharu has long been based in Berlin. Starting in 2000, she created two series of works garnering widespread attention: During Sleep, which combined performance with hospital beds surrounded by a network of black threads; and Memory of Skin, an installation composed of thirteen-meter-long, mud stained dresses. In 2015, Shiota was selected to represent Japan at the 56th Venice Biennale, where she exhibited The Key in the Hand, which without a doubt is considered one of her most influential works.

This year (2021), in collaboration with Japan’s Mori Art Museum, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum has had the distinct honor of presenting Shiota Chiharu: The Soul Trembles, thus affording local audiences the opportunity to experience the artist’s immersive installations firsthand. Curated by Mori Art Museum Director, Kataoka Mami, the exhibition examines and highlights important turning points in the artist's career by presenting sculpture, video and photo documentation of performance artworks, drawings, stage design, and related drawings and documents. A number of powerful, large-scale installations anchor the exhibition of more than one hundred works, enabling audiences to fully appreciate the artist's twenty-five-year creative journey.

Shiota's early works started from her desire to acknowledge life and death, and from this, she extended her works to metaphors that relate to existence and identity, and countless boundaries both personal and universal. Instead of words, she often relies on objects such as beds, window frames, shoes, and suitcases to convey a connection between the object and an imagined owner, thus offering a glimpse of the owner in a story suggested by the object. Shiota regularly uses red, black, and white thread to enclose objects and create elaborate webs in space. The threads represent the complexity of relationships in our human world, and even the complex connections between personal universes and the power of the greater universe. By inviting audience members to walk through these dense networks, Shiota calls forth their intricate memories, as well as hopes her work will remain with them. Through these countless connections, she establishes more relationships with people and the world.

Shiota has said, “Every space is new for me because every space is different. It is the same material but created in a different atmosphere, therefore this installation can only exist there.” After surveying the Museum venue, she tailored the exhibition to the unique features belonging to the site, situating Where are we going? in a windowed corridor, such that its white boats would be bathed in changing natural light, and installing Uncertain Journey, with its dense tangles of red wool yarn, in the seven-meter-high Gallery 1B, such that the audience would be surrounded by its canopy of red thread and shadows. The artist has taken advantage of the specific spatial characteristics of each area to heighten the enchantment of her work.

TFAM is an important stop for Shiota Chiharu's traveling Asian exhibition. In light of the COVID-19 epidemic's impact on international art events, this exhibition would never have been successful if it were not for the active participation of the artist, curator, and Mori Art Museum. I would also like to thank the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in Japan and the Taipeh Vertretung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland for their assistance with consular affairs, Atelier Chiharu Shiota for its technical support, and exhibition sponsors Alcantara S.p.A. for art materials, and Kenji Taki Gallery for covering expenses incurred by the installation personnel. Finally, I would like to thank the Museum team, including its various departments and individuals in Taiwan, who assisted in realizing this exhibition.

Jun-Jieh Wang / Director, Taipei Fine Arts Museum

Probing the Origins of Death / Life: The Cosmic View of Shiota Chiharu

└ Kataoka Mami

Chronology / Plates

Stage Design Projects

A Conversation with Shiota Chiharu

└ Interviewer: Andrea Jahn

List of works