Chiharu Shiota


Chiharu Shiota is a Japanese performance and installation artist. She has been living and working in Berlin since 1996.

Early Life, Education and Teaching

Shiota was born in Osaka. Her parents ran a business manufacturing fish boxes, producing a thousand wooden boxes a day. She wanted to be an artist since she was twelve. Although her parents didn't directly support her desire to be an artist and worried about her, she was able to formally study art. She studied at the Kyoto Seika University in Kyoto from 1992 to 1996, was an exchange student at Canberra School of Art, Australian National University, 1993-93 and a student at Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Braunschweig, from 1997 to 1999 and at Universität der Künste, Berlin, from 1999 to 2003. In an interview with Andrea Jahn, Shiota mentions that her first installation work was Becoming Painting, which was created with red enamel paint she used on her body. "Taking part in Becoming Painting was indeed an act of liberation. It was my first physical piece of work, using my whole body, rather than a skillful artwork." In Berlin, she was a student of Rebecca Horn and in Braunschweig studied with Marina Abramović.
From 2010 to 2013 Shiota was visiting professor at Kyoto Seika University in Kyoto and in 2011 at the California College of the Arts.

Work

Shiota's oeuvre links various aspects of art performances, sculpture and installation practices. Mostly renowned for her vast, room-spanning webs of threads or hoses, she links abstract networks with concrete everyday objects such as keys, window frames, dresses, shoes, boats and suitcases. Her early works are performance pieces, many of which were recorded in photographs and video, in which, for example, she uses mud, while later large-scale installations integrate personal objects given to her by other people. Materials and colors carry particular meanings in her artistic work, in which menstruation blood is used as artistic material and red threads come to signify human relationships. Shiota acknowledges her teacher Marina Abramovic's influence during her formative years and refers to Christian Boltanski's work as a source of inspiration for some of her later installation works. Places matter to her work and she is strongly interested in psychogeography, the relationship between psyche and space. Shiota's thread installation works developed from the artist's experience of moving between places out of which evolved the desire to cover her possessions in yarn thereby marking a personal territory. In an interview she states that she could not have made her large-scale installations, A Room of Memory and Memory of Skin, without living in Berlin. She has also created work in collaboration with choreographers and composers such as Toshio Hosokawa, Sasha Waltz and Stefan Goldmann for opera, concert and dance projects, for example by creating the set design for Matsukaze with Pia Maier Schriever, an opera performance commissioned by Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, Brussels, in cooperation with Grand Théatre de Luxembourg, Teatr Wielki – Polish National Opera and in cooperation with Berliner Staatsoper.

Awards and nominations