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.

Istanbul Modern is hosting a solo exhibition by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota as part of the 100th anniversary celebrations of diplomatic relations between Japan and Turkey. Undoubtedly, the most striking feature of the exhibition is the large-scale installation the artist created specifically for Istanbul Modern. Curated by Öykü Özsoy Sağnak and Yazın Öztürk, the exhibition focuses on themes such as memory, existence, migration, journeys, and the human experience—subjects Shiota frequently explores through various mediums, including performance, video, installation, and painting.

This summer, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston ( ICA) opens the 2025 Watershed season with "Chiharu Shiota: Home Less Home", on view May 22 through Sept.1, 2025. The exhibition features two large-scale installations by the Berlin-based, Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota (born 1972 in Osaka, Japan), including the debut of a new commission made for the ICA Watershed. Shiota foregrounds universal stories of migration, home, connection, memory, and survival. Her signature approach combines intricate, immense, and web-like installations built of thread and rope with quotidian objects—such as shoes, suitcases, beds, chairs, dresses, and keys—that serve as symbols for human presence and memory.

Acclaimed for the singularity of her work, at once melancholy and mysterious, Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota, of the Templon gallery, has set up shop at the Grand Palais until March 19, to reveal in a masterly exhibition a body of work shot through with illness, underlined by her compulsive weaving of threads unfolding in dazzling spidery enchantments.

Co-organized by the GrandPalaisRmn in Paris and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, “The Soul Trembles” is the largest exhibition ever devoted to Berlin-based Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota in France, showcasing over two decades of her multifaceted career. Known since the mid-’90s for her monumental installations of interwoven wool that envelop everyday objects like chairs, keys, suitcases, pianos and clothes, she invites visitors into dreamlike, immersive spaces that explore themes of memory, temporality and human connection. “Threads become tangled, intertwined, broken off, unraveled,” she says. “They constantly reflect a part of my mental state, as if they were expressing the state of human relationships. The black expresses the vast expanse of this deep universe, while the red expresses the red threads that connect one person to another, as well as the color of blood. ” Spanning more than 1,200 square meters, the exhibition includes seven large-scale installations alongside sculptures, photographs, videos, drawings and archival materials, offering a comprehensive overview of Shiota’s practice, which combines performance, body art and installations. By presenting these works, she aims to convey the tremors of her soul, drawing from personal experiences of life’s fragility to create a deeply poetic and emotional journey for viewers. She discusses her current show at the newly-renovated Grand Palais in Paris, on view through March 19, 2025.

Poetic and spectacular, Chiharu Shiota's immense swarms of tangled threads have made her famous the world over. The Grand Palais presents the largest exhibition ever devoted to this Japanese artist, born in 1972: “Chiharu Shiota. The Soul Trembles” (December 11 2024 - March 19 2025). Over 1,200 m² of exhibition space is devoted to monumental works and little-known pieces. Far from remaining on the (very Instagrammable) surface of her installations, the exhibition plunges us into the multiple ramifications of her universe.

The Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota is somewhere between sculpture and performance. Since the 2015 Venice Biennale, her popularity has only grown. On December 11, she will be the first artist to grace the renovated Grand Palais. Portrait of a strong woman with a sensitive soul.

This year marks the 51st anniversary of the Japan Foundation Awards, which were launched in 1973, the year after the establishment of the Japan Foundation. For the past 50 years, the Foundation has presented the Japan Foundation Awards to individuals and organizations that have made significant contributions to promoting international mutual understanding and friendship between Japan and other countries through academic, artistic, and other cultural pursuits. For 2024, the artist Chiharu Shiota is one of the three recipients selected after the screening of 60 candidates nominated by experts and the general public.

Istanbul Modern is currently hosting the exhibition "Between Worlds" (since Septembre, 6th), featuring a large-scale installation created specifically for the museum by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota. Shiota is well-known for her installations that primarily use thread as the main material. Shiota recently answered questions about the exhibition and her artistic practice.