BOMB : Chiharu Shiota Interviewed by Laura Bannister

Installation view of Chiharu Shiota, The Web Above Our Lives, 2023, thread and bronze. Courtesy of Galerie Templon.

In the early 2000s, Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota shot to fame for the labyrinthine installations she produces with colored wool, rope, and thread. These supersized, tangled spider webs swallow whole rooms and hold objects captive in midair. Knotted and twisted over multiple days with a team of assistants, her webs are both hopeful hallucinations—inferring the invisible connectivity that pervades all life on earth—and insuperable, brutal obstacles that force audiences to renegotiate how they move through space.

Shiota’s practice is still characterized by these webs but extends to drawing, sculpture, photography, and performance. Her drawings have a hurried, scrapbook quality: faceless people, swirling tornados. Conceptually, she deals in fundamental uncertainties of the human experience such as alienation and displacement, memory and instability, the chasm between life and death.

I spoke to Shiota—she in her Berlin studio, myself in New York City—in tandem with her solo exhibition at Templon. Signs of Life is her first show in New York City in almost a decade, comprising two colossal threaded immersions, drawings, mixed-media paintings, and freestanding sculptures.

—Laura Bannister

Laura BannisterIn an interview centered on your 2022 exhibition Multiple Realities, you said, “The moment people enter my works, I want them to understand what it is to live and what it is to die.” Your installations in thread and yarn seem to be life-giving and also about endings. They are as much a tangled network of connection points as a giant spider’s web, which itself is an instrument of imprisonment and death. Where do you see the idea of “what it is to die” emerging in recent thread pieces?

Chiharu ShiotaEveryone is going to die; everyone has an end. We know we are going to die, but we cannot feel death every day. But talking about death is thinking of life, and all human existence is thinking about why we exist. My work is actually more about presence, about now. It’s complicated, because I don’t know what death is, but I want to connect it to life.

Installation view of Chiharu Shiota, The Web Above Our Lives, 2023, thread and bronze. Courtesy of Galerie Templon.

LBMany of your works tackle head-on this boundary between death and life. I’m thinking of the fifty-plus life-sized hospital beds climbing toward the heavens in Connected To Life (2021), freestanding doors surrounded by black webbing in Other Side (2013), and a series of lithographs of cells you made in 2020 after starting treatment for ovarian cancer. What is your relationship to death now, having edged toward it in both life and art? Are you afraid of it?

CSDuring chemotherapy I was very close to death. I thought a lot about death, and the more I did, the more I wanted to live. I made the installation Light in the Darkness (2022) about this. I put fairy lights in my chemotherapy bags: the light is like breathing. When I was close to death, I wanted to live more; but when the cancer and sickness was gone, I forgot about death and thought about existence. I thought more about society and connection; when I was sick I thought about death and soul. How can I live after death? What is the soul? Now I think more about how to exist, about society and how to connect with people of all different nationalities.

I am not afraid of death. “Life” and “the soul” are different for me: life is about connection, and the soul is more solitary. It is not connected with society but with the universe. The soul is about eternal life after death.

LBDo you have strong inclinations about what happens to us—our consciousness—after we die?

CSI believe the soul is connected with the universe. When we don’t have a human shape anymore, we still continue to exist somehow.

LBAt the Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art last year you screened interviews with ten-year-old children. You asked them questions like, “What is a soul?” Did your own conception of the soul shift as you listened to the children’s perceptions of it?

CSBecause I had cancer, I spoke to children of the same age as my daughter at the time. I wanted to know when a mother dies, how can a child feel about the soul? What is the understanding of the soul at this age? There were a lot of good answers. One girl explained that the soul is inherited from other generations and then passed along to others; it is not her soul alone. Also, you cannot see the soul from the outside, but it has a color inside. They were very pure answers. I was surprised.

Installation view of Chiharu Shiota, Human Rhizome, 2023, thread and book pages. Courtesy of Galerie Templon.

LBCan we talk about your exhibition Signs of Life? It includes another large-scale installation with whole books and pages suspended in white thread. According to the show notes, your web takes on another meaning here in that you’re also referencing the Internet as an organism, shared knowledge, and collective memory.

CSThe theme of my work is existence in the absence. Humans are not physically present, but their existence is. It is about connection through history, across borders and feelings, across all of the human roots that are connected with white string.

At funerals in Japan, the dead body is dressed in white cloth. There is also a lot of white paper. I wanted to connect with death and another world. The white thread is like a blank space connected to paper and to books and their information. There is no beginning and no end. It can all go on forever.

LBAnother installation in the show is in red thread. In the middle on the floor are two bronze casts of your own arms. What’s the significance of this gesture?

CSIt’s like my artwork Me Somewhere Else (2018). I feel like my body is somewhere else; my body and my feelings are not exactly connected, but I connect them with string. The bronze remains forever, even after my body dies.

LBDoes your psychological connection to a site shift during the installation process?

CSThe installation is everything I make in the space. It is never the same. It is not like an object which is made at the studio; the artwork is like a three-dimensional painting. I am making a drawing in the air and putting feeling into it.

LBYou’re also showing a series of sculptures: different objects suspended in thread. There is a battered suitcase, monochrome photographs, miniature furniture, tiny bottles, and so on.

CSThey’re all found objects from antique shops or flea markets. When people die, these things remain. The first time I found these old objects was up in the attic of my old studio. I discovered small furniture, little bottles . . . a newspaper from the ’70s. It felt like there were a lot of memories stored in them. I started to imagine stories about the objects and the people who owned them. I thought about how everyone has a story inside.

LBMiniatures appear in multiple works of yours, like Connecting Small Memories (2019), which is packed with tiny dollhouse furniture. I remember reading Alice Gregory on miniatures a while back for Harper’s. Her fascination was rooted in gluttony: a hoarding of sensual detail. She also found a thrill in the scale and her comparative bigness in “the masochistic ecstasy of seeing myself as a monster.” What function do the miniatures play for you?

CSI have collected small objects and miniature furniture for many years. When I had my solo exhibition The Soul Trembles at the Mori Art Museum, I wanted to create something new. The exhibition space was on the fifty-third floor. When you look out the window, Tokyo looks like a miniature city. I had the idea that I wanted to connect the outside with the inside using all these little objects I’d been collecting. During Covid, I became more fascinated with miniature furniture because we all had to stay inside, looking at the same furniture every day. I wanted to connect our many stories with red thread.

Detail of Chiharu Shiota, Connected to the Universe, 2022, watercolor and thread on paper, 22 × 30 inches. Courtesy of Galerie Templon.

LBYou’ve long been interested in memory and its slipperiness; research suggests we rewrite our memories often. Each time we recall an event, the details shift slightly. Some of our strongest memories can be total fabrications. As someone who is interviewed often, I expect you’re narrativizing your own history a lot, retelling certain beats: the manufacturing company your parents ran in Osaka that produced wooden fish boxes, an early Vincent van Gogh exhibition your mother took you to. Do you ever notice the instability or untrustworthiness of your own memories? Have you ever caught them shifting or recognized they’ve changed?

CSI noticed my memory changing especially when I started living in Berlin and visited Japan. My memories made Japan more beautiful than it is in reality. When I returned to Japan, I remembered the park where I played as a child very differently. For instance, at the park there was a large concrete mountain. We would try to climb up it, which was hard, and play “Heaven or Hell.” You would either be pulled down to hell or climb up to heaven. But when I returned, the mountain at the park looked so small. Also, when I was little and attending primary school, I would travel on this very long road to school every day. But when I visited Japan for the first time since moving to Germany, the road was so small and short. I continue to create more beautiful memories living far from home.

LBDo you keep a diary?

CSMy drawings are like my diary. I draw now every day.

Chiharu Shiota: Signs of Life is on view at Templon in New York City until March 9.

Article published on https://bombmagazine.org