ART-PRESENTATION: Chiharu Shiota-The Soul Trembles

Chiharu Shiota is known for performances and installations that express the intangible: memories, anxiety, dreams, silence and more. Often arising out of personal experience, her works have enthralled people all over the world and from all walks of life by questioning universal concepts such as identity, boundaries, and existence. Particularly well-known is her series of powerful installations consisting of threads primarily in red and black strung across entire spaces.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Taipei Fine Arts Museum Archive

“Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles” is the largest exhibition devoted to the Berlin-based, internationally active artist. 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. Taking as her theme “presence in absence” Shiota Chiharu has consistently given shape to the auras and energies of things that possess no physical presence, existing only in memories and dreams. Shiota sees her own soma and her works as inseparable entities, and the fact that her body has not featured in her works, apart from a limited number of videos, since her early performances, is also perhaps designed to draw our attention to “presence in absence”. However, when Shiota was informed the year before last that her cancer had returned and started mechanically embarking on the process of hospital treatment, she says she started to wonder about the location of the soul. Through it all, gripped by a sensation akin to her body fragmenting, she started to collect parts of broken dolls, and make bronze casts of her hands and feet once more. In her new installation for this exhibition, body fragments are threaded together, positing questions of the soul and the meaning of life. The motif of the boat features frequently in Shiota Chiharu’s works, conjuring up visions of uncertain lives and futures akin to tiny boats bobbing in vast oceans. Chiharu Shiota 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.

Photo: Chiharu Shiota, In Silence, 2002, Installation, burnt piano, burnt chairs, black wool, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany, Digital print, 30 x 40.5 cm, Photo: Sunhi Mang, © Chiharu Shiota, Courtesy the artist and Taipei Fine Arts Museum

Info: Curator: Mami Kataoka, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, No.181, Sec. 3, Zhongshan N. Rd., Zhongshan Dist., Taipei City, Taiwan, R.O.C., Duration: 1/5-17/10/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 9:30-17:30, www.tfam.museum