Chiharu Shiota: ‘It’s when I’m in pain that I want to create most’

In the summer of 1994, Chiharu Shiota had a dream. ‘I was trapped inside a painting,’ remembers the Japanese artist, who, around 22 at the time, was on an exchange programme at Canberra School of Art, Australia. ‘I was stuck in a two-dimensional world, trying to figure out how I could move in order to make the painting better.’ The next day, the artist doused herself in enamel paint. The toxic paint scorched her skin and stained her hair for months after. Titled Becoming Painting, the performance was both an act of liberation, and a realisation that she could create art with her body.

In the following years, pain and confinement became the creative motor that propelled her performance art. ‘My work has always incorporated this idea of pushing things to the limit. It’s when I’m in pain, or struggling, that I want to create most,’ says Shiota. But from the late 1990s, the artist began experimenting with a material that would later secure her place in the global art world: yarn. Weaving together found objects, boats, and hospital beds in her signature red, black, or white, Shiota’s vast installations reflect on time, human relationships, and mortality. The work is built entirely by hand, repeating the same grueling lines day-on-day for up to two weeks at a time. ‘If I don’t go beyond what I think I’m capable of, I don’t find it interesting,’ she says. 

Born in Osaka in 1972, Shiota sought creative release from a young age. However, her parents ran a factory, building transportation crates for fish, and in a merchants’ city like Osaka, ‘contemporary art didn’t really feel accessible to me,’ she says. Shiota remembers how every Sunday, her local paper would print a feature dissecting a famous work of art. One weekend it was Edvard Munch’s The Scream. ‘I was drawn in by the idea that a single painting could contain such depth,’ she says. By luck a painting school opened in her local area, and ‘little by little, I was pulled deeper into the world of art’.

After studying in Kyoto, Canberra, and Hamburg, in the late 1990s Shiota settled in Berlin, where she still resides. Today her studio occupies a 300m² former factory space. Large enough to trial multiple pieces at once, this workshop is a crucial planning-ground for her installations. The artist spends most days drawing, making object studies, and testing thread patterns before travelling to build the final piece on-site. For Shiota, this challenge is the most enjoyable phase in the process. ‘When you create the work on-site, your intuition becomes part of the piece,’ she explains. ‘Even while hesitating and figuring things out, you make instant decisions as you go. I love the process of working through those moments.’

When thread first entered Shiota’s material orbit, it was purely functional. ‘With painting, you’re working in two dimensions on a flat surface. By using thread, I can draw in three dimensions. I pull the threads as if I’m drawing lines, and with that feeling I stretch the drawing through space,’ she says. ‘At first, it was simply a line for drawing, but as I continued working with it, the acts of connecting, cutting, and tangling began to feel very close to human relationships, how they are severed, and how they become entangled.’ An apt example is The Key in the Hand, an installation the artist created to represent Japan at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. Shiota collected 180,000 keys through open-calls, collection boxes at museums and key manufacturers. Many people attached letters, explaining how the keys once belonged to loved ones that had passed. In the resulting installation 50,000 metal keys are suspended above two wooden boats in a bright crimson web, with the rest scattered across the floor and boats. Both delicate and immense, it is a metaphor for how individual experiences can connect to collective memories.

Found objects such as keys are part of Shiota’s ongoing interest in presence and absence. ‘I’ve always been drawn to old things,’ says Shiota, who regularly visits flea markets to collect everything from suitcases, shoes and passports to letters, and graduation certificates – objects that were once important in someone’s life. ‘I really feel the presence of the person behind them,’ she says. These belongings hold memories and stories, and the yarn becomes the glue that links them together, representing the invisible threads of time and shared experience. In some pieces, like Letters of Thanks (2013), the thread is like a cocoon, cradling the letters carefully and safely. In others, it is a net: an instrument of capture and entrapment.

After a 12-year remission, the cancer returned in 2017. This time, the experience was more traumatic. Just the day before, Shiota had been offered a solo exhibition at Tokyo’s prestigious Mori Art Museum. ‘My very first thought was, ‘I’m so glad I’m alive, and that I kept making work all this time’,’ she remembers. ‘But the very next day, they found a malignant tumor. At that point, it wasn’t a question of what to do next. I was faced with the reality that I could die.’

Through all of this pain and hardship, has Shiota ever thought about quitting? ‘Only once,’ she says. ‘When I was a student, I wanted to become a painter. But the more I painted, the more it felt like my work was just an imitation of someone else’s.’ For about six months, Shiota did nothing at all – no drawing, painting, or weaving. ‘But that was even more painful,’ she says. ‘Since then, I’ve realised that quitting is more painful. It’s essential to continue. To change, and keep creating.’