Chiharu Shiota is a Japanese installation artist who uses intricate web-like string structures that are employed to represent the entanglement of memories and emotions. These “sculptures” are usually site-specific and are performative, needing several days or even weeks to definitely finish them. Her concepts of using webs came from a need she felt to transform an emotional burden into something tangible. The webs are used to symbolize the relation between consciousness and thoughts and are also said to act as a boundary between the inner and outer psyche. Shiota’s art is heavily influenced by her personal experiences as she expresses a worldwide feeling of uprooting from one’s birthplace, and the consequent feeling of loss and isolation, over global issues. In 2015, Shiota has been appointed to represent Japan in the 56th International Art Exhibition, at la Biennale di Venezia. She is now the sixth female artist to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale.
Shiota’s artwork known as “The Key in Hand” is a visual depiction of the various pathways his life could have taken. It is influenced by a poem written by Venice’s representative, Takahiro Iwasaki, called “Garden” which speaks of many keys that don’t open anything and are simply cast away into the rivers. The focal point of the structure is a boat which is floating in the pavilion where 2000 rusty keys tied to red strings emanate from it onto the walls and ceiling of the pavilion. The enigmatic structure allows the viewer to create their own narrative and is very open to interpretation since it does not explicitly seek to express what the artist intended.
Chiharu Shiota was born in 1972 in Japan, where she went on to study art at both the Kyoto Seika University and the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste in Braunschweig, Germany. Shiota moved to Germany when she was 24 years old and has since been based in Berlin. The life-changing experience of leaving Japan and living in a Western country has been central to her throughout her life and her art, with the theme of memory, homesickness, and displacement featuring prominently in her installations and sculptures.
Shiota’s trademark material is yarn because she finds continuity in the material through its nature to surround, twist, and loop. The yarn is a replacement for the human presence, both physically and emotionally, and Shiota says it embodies the lives of people that once were there. She has made various studies and a video retrospective of her site-specific work and early performances, which are pivotal to understanding her installation works. During The Key in the Hand – her presentation at the 56th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia in 2015 at the Japan Pavilion became the grand presentation showcasing its magnitude of allegory of the memory of life events.
Chiharu Shiota is an installation artist born in Osaka in 1972, and she pursued studies in painting at Kyoto Seika University. After which she understood that it would be difficult to exhibit in galleries or museums in Japan, as being an artist wasn’t considered a serious career choice there. She knew she was also too young to have any success in Japan as an artist so she decided she’d have to go to the USA or Europe to continue her studies and have a better chance of showing her work. This was why Shiota has called Germany home since 1997 at which point she had moved to Berlin, where she continues to live today, and trained under acclaimed performance artist Marina Abramović. Although she had initially studied to be a painter she felt working on 2 dimensional canvas too restrictive and was drawn to 3 dimensional due to the sense of infinite options in performance and installation art. To describe the feeling of struggling inside of a painting submerged in oil paint being unable to breathe she had created Becoming Painting in 1994 a paint performance in the School of Art Australia National University, Canberra in Australia where she poured toxic red enamel paint on her whole body, which ended up burning her skin in order to recreate the feeling of being part of an artwork. This was also what made her understand she could make art with her body. Later in her art career it led her to creating immersive thread and yarn installations.
It was not until 2001 that she received meaningful recognition in Japan with Memories of Skin, a collection of towering seven metre high dirt smeared dresses hovering over a shallow pool of water, that was exhibited at the Yokohama International Triennial of contemporary art. This is quite different to some of her more current work with heavy thread usage such as
In silence which she created in 2002 which was an installation of a burnt piano with an empty audience of burnt chairs with alcantara black thread spreading from the burnt furniture in a web upwards towards the ceiling creating this idea of a thick black smoke. This was inspired by one of Shiota’s experiences since when she was younger she had witnessed a neighbour’s house burn down and she had seen their piano burnt and still smoking in front of the house. This experience was something that brought Shiota’s interest into the theme of memories.
Shiota continued showing her work as a global artist who creates installations to convey meanings through physical objects and items, and she exhibits her work globally and creates intimate experiences through these installations.Her signature way of creating installations is with the usage of thread since she describes it as drawing in air. She explains that when drawing on paper you don’t make a sketch of what you’re going to draw on paper you draw and when you make a mistake you can rub it out just like how if you make a mistake with thread you can cut it. With this usage of thread and yarn she aims to convey themes of death, relationships, and get across the power of emotions and memories with this overall idea of connection much like the thread symbolising connection throughout the vast majority of her work.
Later In 2015, she represented Japan at the 56th Venice Biennale. This This Installation piece was displayed at La Biennale di Venezia in Venice in Italy and the photo was taken by Sunni Mang. The photo shows a boat at the front facing upwards and going off to the right of the image and the boat in the background going to the left and also slightly upward. The mood to this piece is dark with the focus on the massive red web above which makes it feel like a forest due to the dark ominous lighting coming through the thread and shadows seen below that look like entangled branches with minimal light.This is an immersive piece in the Japan pavilion which used tens of thousands of keys with there being over 50,000 in the web of red thread with two boats attempting to catch the net of interlaced metal and material as it passed over the site. In this piece I want to explore her themes and aim to discover what her key theme could be.
In this installation the two boats used in this piece are rustic Venetian boats placed in the centre of the space parting the veil of keys and red thread above. The usage of these older Venetian boats link to the local environment as it’s being displayed in Venice which is giving the installation a sense of connection to the local community and their history. This shows that one of the themes that Shiota wanted to get across in this piece was connection much like some of her other thread works. The usage of these two boats could also be used to symbolise crossing a sea of emotions to reach an unknown destination which is like how she incorporates the keys, each containing their own histories and traces of other people. The boats can also symbolise a journey as they can be seen as a mode of transport and a way to move through life collecting memories and experiences which would be the keys. This can also bring about the idea of forgotten memories as the keys fill the boats and spill out and not all the keys can be caught much like how some memories are forgotten and lost like the old forgotten keys which have been rusted. These two boats are angled upwards as if facing up to heaven but also in a way as if trying to catch the keys that are suspended in the air. The link to heaven is a connection that can be made due to Shiota’s close relationship with death and terminal illness due to her battle with cancer. There’s also other reasoning for this understanding which is from the thread.
The only thread used in this installation was red. This red is very brightly coloured and can feel quite overwhelming as a colour from the amount of it being used as it infills the building’s ceilings and walls making the space feel like a red immersive expanse. The emotional and visceral feeling evoked from this red can be seen as symbolic since it looks like the colour of blood which links back to the theme of connection. Crisscrossing threads here represent the complicated web of human relationships. The colour is paramount with red representing the flow of blood through arteries or the path of fate in Japanese, Chinese and Korean cultures and in her other works she has used black which explores the night sky, illness, death and pain whilst white can be seen as a symbol of hope, life, purity and infinity.
This is why a majority of Shiota’s work uses those three colours with a higher rate of black thread and red thread since that was her way of showing a sense of connection by sharing her experience of cancer as she had been diagnosed and described it as she “was in a conveyor belt of death… and did not know where to put her soul” this can also show her fear as some of her thread works looked more frantic than flowing which also reflects the state of mind she is in when working on the installations.
With her works in mind the sense of connection shows to be very strong since you can’t go through life without connecting to people. This can be shown through the thousands of keys used were collected from people across the globe for this installation that were then strung onto the red yarn. There is also this idea that everyone’s fate is linked with there being knots in the red thread and there are knots in place to hold the keys together. This makes the thread act as a way to show connection and also this idea of shared memory since the keys have been collected from the public and the majority of the keys are rusted which shows they have been used and have been in homes and families for quite some time which raises the theme of connection and community.
The installation seeks to explore this notion of memory using tens of thousands of keys collected from people across the globe in its realisation. The memories of everyone who provided Shiota with keys then overlapped with her own memories for the first time. These overlapping memories will in turn combine with those of the people from all over the world who come to see the biennale, giving them a chance to communicate in a new way and better understand each other’s feelings’. Another reasoning for using Keys is because they are familiar and very valuable things that protect important people and spaces in people’s lives. There is also this idea of being allowed to open other people’s doors and connect with them but also not knowing where any of the keys fit anymore and them being unusable creates this idea of being able to open doors and places to the unknown, which provides a sense of trust thus strengthening this form of connection that Shiota has created. It also creates a link of lost and found which further proves my idea of connection being a key theme in Shiota’s work.
In conclusion this shows that Chiharu Shiota’s key theme in the majority of her works is connection which can be seen through the many ways she brings this into her installation works from involving people in her art, creating immersive experiences for people and using items that people own, her own life experiences and with her main usage of thread and creating connections with it.
The Key in Hand” 2015, The 56th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy, photo by Sunni Mang https://www.chiharu-shiota.com/top
This image shows one of Chiharu Shiota’s installations “The Key in Hand” which was displayed in Venice, Italy
The installation is of two boats catching floating keys, with the keys being suspended with the usage of red thread
It is one of Shiota’s thread installations where she used thread to keep keys suspended from the ceiling
The usage of keys – an everyday item yet still very personal
50,000 rusty keys (estimate number) suspended
130,000 in boats with some surround the boats on the floor
Everyone uses them and passes them on
keys keep things safe so the idea of putting them out in the open is showcasing Shiota’s vulnerability due to their exposure
Keys are used in people’s hands – idea of handholding? Closeness – family, being passed down
keys opening doors – the sayings revolving round things like one door closes another one opens etc
looking at all the keys being entangled by thread it seems to also suggest the idea of entrapment
Connection is a form of entrapment
The usage of boats suggests a journey
Chinese proverb of “one foot can not stand in two boats” – does this have any significance to the usage of two boats?
The boats are old rotted Venetian boats – significance and meaning
https://www.chiharu-shiota.com/top
“The Key in Hand” 2015, The 56th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy, photo by Sunni Mang https://www.chiharu-shiota.com/top
Yoshitomoto, Midori,
Natsuko Odte, Shiota Chiharu intabyu: Sasaina, omoi ga yobisamasu kyotsu kioku no suicchi’ (‘Chiharu Shiota Interview: Small Sentiments Trigger Common Memory Like a Switch’), ART iT, 10 September 2010, http://www.art-it.asia/u/admin%5fed%5fitv/i2vWjzhgHI7kLYVuxMA8/, accessed 10th January (translated)
Mun-Delsalle Y-Jean (2021) ‘Web-Spinning artist Chiharu Shiota Creates Moving And Haunting Installations Out Of Wool’ Available at https://www.forbes.com/sites/yjeanmundelsalle/2021/07/19/web-spinning-artist-chiharu-shiota-creates-moving-and-haunting-installations-out-of-wool/?sh=1e818c3e669f (accessed date 10th, 12th,18th January 2024)
Shiota Chiharu https://www.chiharu-shiota.com/ (accsessed 10th, 12th, 17th, 18th January 2024)
A. S. 2015, sep/oct issue 106, p130-131. 2p. Accessed 18th Jan 2024. Key Chain
Acaret, Susan. (2016) Chiharu Shiota ArtAsiaPacific, issue 99, p52-53 (accessed 17th, 18th January 2024)
Longzijun. (2015) ‘The Key in the Hand by Chiharu Shiota (Venice Biennale 2015)’ Diary Of Contemporary Art And Architecture https://artjouer.wordpress.com/2015/10/27/the-key-in-the-hand-by-chiharu-shiota/ (accessed 18th January 2024)
Citations needed in every paragraph and a bibliography – sources must include an academic journal, a book , an article, a website – at least one of each – also use some relevant quotes
also referencing to the figures (images)
First image attached of the two boats with the first boat going upwards to right is the main image to be analysed the others show the installation from other viewpoint though so must be used too
Make sure there is clear evidence to support the points made and that everything is referenced and cited correctly (plagerism free)
