In Threads of Life, Chiharu Shiota delivers a spectacular and truly immersive experience.

This major monographic exhibition of the Japanese artist’s is a wide-ranging, complex, expressively powerful exhibition that traces back over all of Shiota’s production, through drawings, photographs, sculptures and some of her most famous environmental and monumental installations.

Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles is the largest solo exhibition to date of Berlin-based Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota. Since its premiere at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, in 2019, it has travelled to eight other venues around the world and will be coming to Montreal in the fall of 2026—mark your calendars!

In the past year alone, Chiharu Shiota has staged exhibitions in several countries around the world, including Austria, China, Hong Kong, Italy, and Turkey. But even as 2025 wraps up, the Japanese artist is showing no signs of slowing down. Now, Shiota’s innovative, web-like work has landed in New York for her second-ever solo show in the city.

In her first institutional exhibition in New York, the artist transforms Japan Society into a vast emotional landscape where memory and longing intertwine.

A deftly woven net of red string envelopes viewers at Chiharu Shiota’s first New York museum show, at the Japan Society. The site-specific installation, which is studded with sheets of loose papers replicating excerpts from the diaries of Japanese soldiers from World War II, is one of two pieces the institution commissioned for “Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries.”

The artist has had museum solo shows on three continents this year alone—but her outing at Japan Society was her first in New York.

A cancer survivor, a mother and a woman: Japanese thread artist Chiharu Shiota reflects on her many hats that led her to create her latest work, inspired by blood, in Hong Kong.

Teshima, Kagawa Pref. – Step off the ferry at Teshima’s Ieura port, 25 minutes from the nearest mainland city of Tamano, Okayama Prefecture, and life goes quiet. The odd car passes by; occasionally, a town bus. On the far side of the island, tucked away in a dilapidated house southeast of the port and southwest of the island’s titular art museum, Chiharu Shiota’s “Memory of Lines” waits for visitors.

Through Fairy Lights and Butterflies, Chiharu Shiota Tethers Presence and Absence. Inspired by Taoist philosophy, Shiota blurs the line between dream and reality. The artist installation at Beijing’s Red Brick Art Museum explores presence in absence. The butterfly wings, red threads, and ancient relics evoke cycles of life and time, inviting the public to meditate on connection, memory, and the spirit’s enduring essence.

Red Brick Art Museum sets itself apart with its impressive, longer-term art showings, and this current exhibition is no different. I recently revisited the museum to see "Silent Emptiness," a fantastic showing of the work of the brilliant Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota. 

he Berlin-based Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota (b. 1972) has charmed the art world with her monumental, intricate installations made of threads and found objects. In an interview, the artist discusses her latest institutional exhibitions—”Chiharu Shiota : The Soul Trembles” on view at the Grand Palais in Paris through March 19, 2025 ; and “Chiharu Shiota : The Unsettled Soul” on view through April 28, 2025 in Prague—life between two homes, and her wild guess as to exactly how many kilometers of thread she has used over the years to complete her intricate, spell-binding installations.