Shiota’s environments draw on personal experiences and collective ideas around memory, identity, and relations between people and places. Shiota left Japan as a young artist to study in Germany, where she still lives. Through recurring materials and symbolic motifs—ropes, threads, dresses, suitcases, paper, keys, and other objects—she conveys emotional and psychological states that are intimate, deeply interconnected, and infinite.

Chiharu Shiota (b. 1972, Osaka) is a Berlin-based artist whose practice often emerges from personal experiences or emotions, which she expands into universal human concerns such as life, death, and relationships. Her work seeks to redefine the concept of memory and consciousness by collecting ordinary objects, such as shoes, keys, beds, chairs ,and dresses, engulfing them in monumental thread structures. Her work has been displayed at institutions worldwide, and she has also participated in numerous international exhibitions. In 2015, Shiota was selected to represent Japan at the 56th Venice Biennale. She was awarded the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology’s Art Encouragement Prize in Japan for the second time in 2024, after receiving the prize as a new artist in 2008.

Image at top: Installation view of Chiharu Shiota: Infinite Memory, 2025 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2026, and Chiharu Shiota. Photo: Dan Leung © M+, Hong Kong