For the past two decades, Chiharu Shiota has created entire universes woven from pieces of string, which has become her signature medium in the making of deeply moving, haunting and poetic large-scale environments interspersed with found objects like shoes, dresses, book pages, suitcases, bed frames, windows and doors. Encountering the Berlin-based Japanese artist’s somewhat autobiographical work is like entering another dimension: we can imagine ourselves inside a monumental spider’s web, under a giant sail, in a cave or under ocean waves.

For the past two decades, Chiharu Shiota has created entire universes woven from pieces of string, which has become her signature medium in the making of deeply moving, haunting and poetic large-scale environments interspersed with found objects like shoes, dresses, book pages, suitcases, bed frames, windows and doors.

Shiota’s installations typically employ thread like a spider’s web wrapping up everyday objects such as shoes and dresses. She clearly has admirers in Asia, too, as her previous record of $243,000 was set at Phillips in Hong Kong. That was about four times the estimate.

When I was invited to create this show, I was very happy but while I was preparing for it, my doctor told me that my cancer returned so I had to do an operation and chemotherapy. During this time, I was thinking a lot about life and death, questions like "if my body would die, where is my soul going?". Because of that, I put this kind of feeling in the title, The Soul Trembles.