ART CITIES: N.York-Chiharu Shiota
The starting points for the majority of Chiharu Shiota’s installations are collections of used everyday objects that act as expressions of human acts. Complex networks of yarn are interlaced around and between the objects, linking their inherent narratives and creating a new visual plane, as if painting in mid-air, to explore the relationship between living and dying and to access memories found within these objects.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Templon Archive
Chiharu Shiota has been working with threads since her student days. Initially she studied painting, but finding the canvas and paper too limiting, she searched for a more physical, holistic way to create art. After a foundation degree in painting at Seika University in Kyoto, Chiharu Shiota chose to pursue her artistic studies in Berlin, focusing on performance. Over time she developed her inimitable weaving technique, which she began applying in ever-larger spatial installations. Gradually she also began embedding found objects steeped in personal memories. While the content of her work is often personal, it transcends the private level and acquires wider universal significance. Shiota strives to engage the viewer in a process of rekindling feelings and memories that might not be accessible on a conscious level. She weaves knotted threads to create fantastical scenes combining salvaged window frames, a piano, suitcases, books and used clothes. Bordering on drawing and sculpture, her fabulous ephemeral, immersive installations have become her signature. Since her impressive installation for the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Bienniale in 2015, she has become one of the key figures on the international art scene and is regularly invited to show her work at museums worldwide. After nearly a decade’s absence from the New York contemporary art scene, Chiharu Shiota is returning with “Signs of Life”, a new exhibition featuring a site-specific installation and a series of previously unseen sculptures and drawings. In a hyper-connected world, Chiharu Shiota’s new exhibition questions the notion of the “web”, a living organism similar to the structures that make up the universe or the neurons our brains are built on. Created on-site over two weeks, a large-scale installation made of white threads symbolizes this permanent connection of information, collective memory and the world’s knowledge which cuts across cultures and continents. At the heart of the work are two arms, her own, placed on the ground. They are cast in bronze, palms facing up to the sky. “I always thought that if death took my body, I wouldn’t exist anymore,” explains the artist. “I’m now convinced that my spirit will continue to exist because there is more to me than a body. My consciousness is connected to everything around me and my art unfolds by way of people’s memory”. The installation is followed by a series of sculptures. Enfolded at the center of each one, as though frozen in place by the intertwined threads, are objects from daily life. “I feel that the objects we possess are like a third skin,” she says. “We accumulate these things and transpose our presence and our memory to them”. Often obsolete, weighed down by impenetrable histories, these objects (old suitcases, stained dolls, miniature pieces of furniture and tiny bottles) represent the treasures offered up by memory, to be seen but not touched.
Photo: Chiharu Shiota, Signs of Life, Installation view, Galerie Templon-New York, 2023, Courtesy Galerie Templon
Info: Galerie Templon, 293 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 19/1-9/3/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.templon.com/
