The Asian Art Museum’s spring exhibition, Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries, weaves memory, absence, and identity with dense networks of red thread and personal and symbolic objects. Visitors won’t be staring at art hanging on the opposite wall; they will instead enter the work and merge with the artist’s meditation on identity, displacement, and what it means to belong.
Memory and a sense of place
“When I am in Germany, I miss Japan, and when I return to Japan, I miss Germany,” Shiota has said. “It’s an in-between sensation.” At the center of the exhibition is the show’s namesake piece, Two Home Countries. Two metal house forms are connected by a dress-shaped structure made of red rope, its wiry strands reaching out to both locations. As a stand-in for the human body, the dress represents an individual split between places. Shiota, born in Osaka in 1972 and based in Berlin since the mid-1990s, is best known for her monumental red thread installations that take over architectural spaces. Thread is both a delicate and powerful form, containing everyday objects woven in, such as keys, shoes, and documents. The boundaries are porous, mirroring presence and absence. The work invites viewers to sit with uncertainty, longing, vulnerability, and the persistence of memory.
Mappings of inner life
Installed in the museum’s Yang Yamazaki Pavilion, the largest of its special exhibition galleries, Two Home Countries spans Shiota’s career, bringing together immersive installations, sculpture, video, and performance works, resulting in an experience that is as physical as it is psychological. The exhibition opens with Diary, a large-scale installation recreated specifically for the Asian Art Museum. Strands of red yarn stretch across the 88-foot length of the pavilion, creating a spectacle surrounding audiences as they pass through. Handwritten pages hang overhead from the journals of Japanese soldiers during World War II and postwar German civilians, suspended in the web as thoughts frozen in time. The giant red cocoon becomes a dream space, haunted by what fragmented ideas remain after the writers vanish. The dense network of threads fills the space like veins or neural pathways, sending visceral signals. The work is inspired by the artist’s trips to Berlin flea markets, where photographs, passports, and other personal ephemera serve as representatives of their owners. The installation was also inspired by the Japanese literature scholar Donald Keene, who described translating diaries written by Japanese soldiers during World War II as a deeply intimate encounter with people he would never meet.
Performance and theater
Materials related to KINKAKUJI (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion), a theatrical work commissioned by the Japan Society in New York, highlight the artist’s role as a stage designer. The production is based on Yukio Mishima’s novel about obsession and destruction, using suspended cords and shifting light to extend the performer’s movements through space. Documentation of the work appears alongside sketches and projections, emphasizing the nebulous boundary between installation and performance.
Embodiment
Shiota’s autobiographical works confront physical illness, specifically her battles with cancer. Embodiment confronts the body and survival. Glass forms resembling internal organs press against wire nets in Cell, while Beyond my Body suspends sheets of incised leather above a pair of bronze feet. The disconnection between the feet and hanging leather evokes skin, absence, and the fragmentation of the self. Grappling with fear and survival, the pieces are not cathartic explorations related to healing. Instead, these works function as her own reckonings with mortality.
Shiota has experienced a surge in international visibility in the last year. In addition to a major retrospective in Turin traveling from Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, her work is currently on view in New York City, Milan, Vienna, and Chongqing.
“Chiharu Shiota’s work resonates because it makes emotional states visible,” said Soyoung Lee, the Barbara Bass Bakar director and CEO of the Asian Art Museum. “Her installations speak to the experience of living between places, histories, and identities — an experience that feels increasingly familiar to many people today.”
