Chiharu Shiota: red string, black threads and cultural identity

Although Chiharu Shiota is an artist best known for her large-scale thread installations, our Hayward Gallery exhibition – the artist’s first solo show at a London public institution – covers all aspects of her practice.

Yung and Cheng’s tour begins with a series of 460 drawings by Shiota for the newspaper serialisation of Yoko Tawada’s ‘Praktikantin (The Trainee)’, a work which explores the notion of cultural identity and the challenges of translation.

The pair move on to look at two of Shiota’s thread works. The first is State of Being (Dress), 2025, which encapsulates Shiota’s concept of clothes serving as a second skin. The other is the ‘epic’ Threads of Life, from which the exhibition takes its name, a sprawling installation with thousands of keys suspended in red thread – a visualisation of the relationships between people and objects.

The tour concludes with a look at Wall, 2010, a personal and intimate video piece in which the artist lies naked on the floor of a clinically-lit room entwined in thin tubes.