CHIHARU SHIOTA

Born in Osaka in 1972 and based in Berlin since the late 1990s, Shiota works across performance, sculpture, drawing, and large-scale installation, and represented Japan at the 56th Venice Biennale with The Key in the Hand. Her artworks have been exhibited at major museums including Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art (MIMOCA), and Gropius Bau in Berlin, positioning her as a leading figure in international installation art.

Early life and education of Chiharu Shiota

Chiharu Shiota was born in Osaka, Japan, in 1972 and grew up in the Kansai region before studying painting at Kyoto Seika University. During her studies she travelled abroad, attending Canberra School of Art in Australia, and later moved to Germany to study under performance and installation artists including Marina Abramović and Rebecca Horn.

Shiota has lived and worked in Berlin since the late 1990s, developing a practice that moves between Japan and Europe and often reflects her sense of having ‘two home countries’. Experiences of displacement, illness, and confronting her own mortality have been central to her thinking about time, memory, and what remains when the body or a place is left behind.

Chiharu Shiota artworks and style

Chiharu Shiota’s artworks are best known for their dense webs of red, black, or white yarn that envelop objects such as boats, keys, beds, dresses, and pianos, creating vast, room-filling environments that visitors can enter or move around. Working in situ with teams of assistants, she ‘draws in space’ with thread, responding to each architecture while using found and donated belongings to evoke personal and collective memory.

Her work links performance, sculpture, and installation, often staging a ‘presence in the absence’ of the body through empty garments, furniture, and objects charged with past use. Across installations, drawings, and sculptures, recurring themes include connection and separation, the fragility of life, the passage of time, and the intricate networks—emotional, bodily, and social—that bind people together.

Early works and developments, 1990s–2000s

Shiota’s early practice in the 1990s centred on performance and body-based works in which she tested physical and psychological limits, sometimes covering herself in earth or confining herself in small spaces. These actions, often documented in photographs and video, established her interest in vulnerability, boundaries, and the trace the body leaves behind.

From the late 1990s and early 2000s, she began creating ‘cobweb’ installations using black thread that filled rooms and trapped objects such as beds, chairs, and windows, turning domestic settings into haunting architectures of memory. Works like After That (1996) and installations featuring suspended dresses explored presence through absence, using empty garments as surrogates for bodies and intensifying the emotional charge of unoccupied space.

Mature practice and key series, 2000s–2010s

By the 2000s Shiota’s large-scale thread works had become her signature, realised in museums and biennales worldwide. She often invited people to donate keys, shoes, letters, or other personal items, integrating them into installations as carriers of individual histories within a shared web.

A key work from this period is The Key in the Hand (Japan Pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale, 2015), in which around 50,000 donated keys hung in a vast canopy of red thread above two weathered boats. The installation suggested journeys, memories, and the stories embedded in everyday objects, and its enthusiastic reception marked a turning point in her international visibility.

Another important body of work features boat forms and suspended networks, such as Uncertain Journey, in which red yarn cascades through a gallery space towards skeletal boat hulls on the floor. These works evoke blood vessels, neural pathways, and intertwined destinies, expressing both the vulnerability and resilience of human existence.

Recent projects and ongoing themes, 2010s–

Since the 2010s, Shiota has expanded her practice through large retrospectives and projects that explicitly address illness, war, and the intersection of personal and collective trauma. The major survey Shiota Chiharu: The Soul Trembles, first presented at Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and later touring internationally, brought together 25 years of work, from early performances to monumental installations.

Exhibitions such as Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries at Japan Society in New York use new commissions to connect wartime histories with the artist’s own experiences of living between nations, confronting mortality, and navigating cultural displacement. Across recent projects she continues to work with thread, boats, windows, and letters, treating them as metaphors for borders, thresholds, and the traces left by movement through time and space.

Public commissions by Chiharu Shiota

• 2000s–2020s – Large-scale site-specific thread installations commissioned by public museums and cultural institutions in Japan, Europe, and North America, including outdoor and atrium works.
• Institutional commissions incorporating local histories and community participation, for example works using donated keys, shoes, and letters gathered from residents of each city.

Awards and honours of Chiharu Shiota

• 2008 – Art Encouragement Prize from the Japanese Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.
• 2015 – Representation of Japan at the 56th Venice Biennale with The Key in the Hand, Japan Pavilion, Venice, Italy.
• 2010s–2020s – Major survey exhibitions such as Shiota Chiharu: The Soul Trembles, initiated by Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, touring to institutions in Asia, Europe, and North America.

To be kept up to date with news relating to Chiharu Shiota, follow her on Ocula.

Exhibitions of Chiharu Shiota

Chiharu Shiota has been the subject of solo and group exhibitions at leading museums and galleries worldwide, including institutions in Tokyo, Berlin, Paris, Wellington, Montreal, and Brisbane. Below is a selection of important exhibitions featuring Chiharu Shiota’s artworks.

Select solo exhibitions

• Japan Pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition, Venice, Italy, 2015.
• Shiota Chiharu: The Soul Trembles, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, 2019 (largest retrospective of the artist’s career, later touring internationally).
• Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries, Japan Society Gallery, New York, United States, 2026.
• Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada, 2026–2027.
• Solo exhibitions at Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art (MIMOCA), Kagawa; National Museum of Art, Osaka; and Museum of Art, Kochi, Japan.

Select group exhibitions

• Yokohama Triennale, Yokohama, Japan, 2001.
• Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, Australia, 2016.
• International group exhibitions at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Gropius Bau, Berlin; Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington.

To be kept up to date with upcoming exhibitions featuring Chiharu Shiota, follow her on Ocula.

Website, Instagram, and further reading

Chiharu Shiota’s website can be found at her official site, which provides an overview of her installations, exhibitions, and publications. Chiharu Shiota’s social media presence is maintained through institutional and gallery channels that share images and videos of her large-scale thread works and exhibition installations.

The artist’s practice has been discussed in leading art magazines and institutional catalogues, including publications for Shiota Chiharu: The Soul Trembles and features in international art press. You can read articles about Chiharu Shiota and view exhibitions featuring Chiharu Shiota on Ocula.

Chiharu Shiota FAQs

Ocula | 2026