Weaving threads of reminiscence and interlacing private and collective tales, Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota is finest recognized for her large-scale installations made from interwoven strands—usually crimson, black or white—that remodel whole areas into immersive, poetic and deeply evocative environments. Etched within the minds of many is her majestic set up The Key within the Hand, wherein two boats anchored within the Japan Pavilion on the 2015 Venice Biennale have been enveloped in a dense net of crimson threads and greater than 50,000 keys collected from folks world wide—every vessel and materials remnant of reminiscence, belief and human connection, binding collectively international histories of grief and migration with timeless legendary tropes.
But it took a number of years for Shiota to achieve worldwide recognition, an increase probably accelerated by the rising reputation of immersive artwork experiences and the visible attain of social media platforms like Instagram. Now internationally celebrated as one in all Japan’s most iconic and sought-after artists, Shiota is presenting her first institutional exhibition in New York, on view at Japan Society by means of January 11, 2026. Observer spoke with the artist in regards to the that means behind her evocative installations, the connection between physique and reminiscence that lies on the core of her observe and the way her newest work confronts the trauma and legacy of World Conflict II—a topic whose reverberations really feel more and more rapid amid at the moment’s geopolitical instability.
The present’s title, “Two House Nations,” already suggests a state of in-betweenness, a division—a fracture—of diasporic identification, very similar to the one Shiota has lengthy inhabited, residing and dealing in Berlin whereas sustaining robust ties to her residence nation. But, as she clarifies, this title was meant to be extra constructive. “I don’t should resolve which nation I belong to, I could be each,” she says. “If somebody would pressure me to decide on then I might really feel in diaspora and my identification separated. I imagine we are able to have a number of residence nations; that is my expertise.” What she goals to precise, as a substitute, is a way of shared humanity—one thing all of us possess in our existential journey by means of the world, past the borders we create.
This attitude presents a compelling lens by means of which to strategy the eightieth anniversary of the top of World Conflict II, one of many exhibition’s central themes. Though Shiota didn’t expertise the battle firsthand, she stands between two nations profoundly formed by it, every bearing its lingering results on the collective psyche. This historic dialogue materializes in her new site-specific set up Diary (2025), which interlaces a fancy ecosystem of particular person tales and destinies—of struggling, emotion and remembrance—into an intricate net of crimson threads and diary pages the place private and collective reminiscence converge right into a deeply shifting shared historical past.
Over time, Shiota has found many diaries at flea markets in Germany. “They fascinate me as a result of as soon as they have been so necessary to somebody, however after that individual died, they have been thrown away and ended up in flea markets,” she displays. What makes this set up distinctive, nonetheless, is that it consists of diaries from Japanese troopers collected and translated by literary scholar Donald Keene. Notably, many of those diaries ended with a request in English asking that they be returned to their households if discovered. “The diaries are principally written in Japanese, however generally there’s one sentence in English, like: ‘If you happen to discover this diary, please ship it to my household.’ That actually touched me and I feel it touched Donald Keene, too.”
For Shiota, that English sentence revealed the soldier’s humanity. “He died as a human being, not simply as a soldier. At that second, he didn’t care in regards to the battle anymore; he simply needed to attach along with his household,” she displays, including that the title “Two House Nations” conveys that we don’t have to decide on between them. “If we are able to settle for two nations, two nationalities or two identities on the identical time, possibly there could be much less battle.”
Floating above a tranquil indoor waterfall beside the staircase, Past My Physique (2025) poetically captures the openness of an in-between state—between worlds, between realms. The suspended webs of crimson yarn counsel fluidity and launch from gravity, as if inviting one to float past the terrestrial limits symbolized by the pair of sneakers anchored to the bottom.
Within the second gallery, Two House Nations (2025) options two metallic home frames tethered to a gown type by Shiota’s signature crimson threads, evoking her expertise of residing between Japan and Germany. Not like earlier works that dwell on rupture or grief, this piece gestures towards coexistence, connection and the emotional complexity of belonging to multiple place directly—of weaving collectively parts of each cultures right into a single, intertwined self.
Shiota’s signature webs of crimson yarn weave round objects and areas like neural and emotional networks of reminiscence. On this sense, the threads operate as each bodily and metaphorical traces—binding, connecting and capturing recollections inside area. These installations usually start as sketches, translating interior psycho-emotional threads into drawn traces earlier than materializing as complicated spatial methods—makes an attempt to visualise the interaction between goal actuality, cognitive reflection and emotional resonance. But, regardless of mapping these webs on paper, the ultimate final result can by no means be absolutely managed. The sketches, she says, exist primarily for museums or galleries in search of to grasp her imaginative and prescient. “I take advantage of it to share the picture I’ve in my thoughts, however in the long run, the ultimate work is rarely precisely just like the sketch. If I didn’t should make sketches, I wouldn’t,” she notes. “I have to create my work throughout the area. It’s like I’m drawing within the air with thread.”
Shiota admits that initially, she needed to be a painter, however throughout her research, the whole lot she made felt by-product. It lacked that means and he or she couldn’t see her identification in it. “After I began weaving with thread, it felt similar to drawing, however now in three dimensions,” she says. “The buildup of traces creates a deep coloration and I can specific extra emotion by means of the fabric.”
If the primary gallery explores public and collective reminiscence of battle, the second invitations guests deeper into Shiota’s broader observe, which incorporates delicately painted gouaches and drawings on paper, together with sculptures and early radical performances centered on the physique—testing its expressive limits, endurance and fragility to disclose it as a web site of reminiscence, whether or not of grief and trauma or of free, inventive erotic impulse.
Very similar to members of the postwar Gutai group, Shiota’s work has lengthy interrogated the physique’s expressive potential past inflexible social and conventional boundaries. Early performances comparable to Turning into Portray (1994), Rest room (1999), Wall (2010) and Earth and Blood (2013) doc how she used her personal physique as each medium and topic, usually confronting concepts of authorship, vulnerability and emotional containment. These performances type the inspiration of her visible language, wherein psychic and emotional stress extends into area, shaping her phenomenology of being as a physique sure by time and matter—fragile, transient and profoundly human.
Even in her net installations, Shiota usually makes use of clothes, sneakers, beds or suitcases as surrogates for the physique—objects that bear traces of human presence but stay empty, evoking absence and the fragility of existence. She says that is why the central theme of her work is in the end the notion of “existence within the absence”: nobody is there, but their presence lingers. “When a human being, like my father, dies, I out of the blue really feel that he’s current, but he’s not there. It’s a really unusual feeling, however many individuals expertise it,” she displays. “If I don’t have reminiscence, I can’t clarify who I’m. My physique is only a vessel,” she provides. On this sense, objects turn into vessels and archives—able to holding reminiscence, of retaining a physique alive throughout the area of the thoughts and creativeness, even after it’s gone.
Within the closing room, a collection of visceral but clear glass sculptures resembling inside organs straight embody this concept. Enclosed in wire and thread, they counsel constriction and parasitic invasion—forces that endanger vitality whereas exposing fragility. These works belong to her latest collection Cell (2024-2025), which additionally consists of drawings depicting summary mobile accumulations impressed by her latest expertise with most cancers. On the identical time, these drawings symbolically hyperlink the microcosm of the human physique to the macrocosm of nature, connecting private expertise to a common order. “After I had most cancers, I thought of my physique dying and the place my soul would go,” she confides. “At the moment, I felt that dying was not simply the top, however a connection to the universe or a approach to proceed in one other universe.”
Different latest gouaches construct on this concept as profound meditations on the person’s place inside a bigger net of interdependence and connection. As their title suggests, Linked to the Universe, these works already specific an consciousness of the physique and psyche as components of a higher complete. Just a few years after her sickness, in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, Shiota mirrored on how little was recognized in regards to the virus or the longer term. In that second of uncertainty, when humanity once more confronted its personal fragility, she discovered renewed inspiration. “I felt impressed to attract a really small human all the time related by a line to the cosmos, a universe of connection,” she says. “My paintings comes from these emotions.”
For the exhibition, Shiota additionally designed the set for a brand new theatrical manufacturing commissioned by Japan Society’s Performing Arts, KINKAKUJI (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion) (2025), marking the primary time American audiences will see her stage design. Whereas her installations usually resemble theatrical phases, this isn’t her first collaboration in scenography. The play, tailored from Yukio Mishima’s 1956 novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion—itself impressed by the true story of a younger monk who burned down Kyoto’s famed Zen temple in 1950—transforms that act right into a psychological and philosophical reflection on magnificence, obsession and destruction, capturing postwar Japan’s ethical disorientation, the fragility of idealism and the strain between the sacred and the profane.
Developed with Leon Ingulsrud, the manufacturing resonated deeply with lots of Shiota’s enduring themes, permitting her to develop her visible language into theatrical type. “The choreographer Leon Ingulsrud informed me that the principle character of the play lives in their very own actuality, separated from society, like behind a curtain. That received me fascinated about the connection between these two worlds,” Shiota explains. “I imagined a line exhibiting how he lives contained in the curtain, generally he opens it to see one other world after which goes again to his smaller world.” Premiering on September 11, the play demonstrated how Shiota’s emotive and symbolically charged universe may unfold right into a broader choreography of narratives and recollections on stage, carried by the facility of storytelling already embedded in her intricately woven inventive world.
Though not organized as a standard profession survey, “Two House Nations” permits viewers to expertise the complete scope of Shiota’s observe, which extends far past her most recognizable thread installations and sculptures to discover among the most timeless and profound questions of human existence—distilling from the private one thing wholly and universally human.
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