“Chiharu Shiota: The Trembling Soul” exhibition has sparked discussions in the art world and media since its debut at the Tokyo Mori Art Museum in 2019, achieving a remarkable milestone of approximately 600,000 visitors at its first stop in Tokyo! This highly popular artist is renowned for creating large-scale art installations using thread. What is the charm of her work that attracts so many people?
In May of this year, Chiharu Shiota’s exhibition toured to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, bringing a popular Japanese exhibition to Taiwan. Local art enthusiasts who missed the overseas exhibition twice due to the pandemic do not need to be disappointed, as the Taipei Fine Arts Museum is currently offering online guided tours, allowing those who cannot personally attend the exhibition to view the largest retrospective exhibition of Chiharu Shiota’s 25-year career through the Taipei Fine Arts Museum app. The entire online exhibition includes paintings, sketches, videos, installation art, and more, using a diverse range of works to guide viewers through Chiharu Shiota’s aesthetics and every beautiful and painful moment in her life.
Chiharu Shiota excels in using delicate spatial handling techniques to create large-scale art installations woven with lines, with works revolving around the creator’s life state, themes such as life and death, dreams, and memories. The day after receiving an invitation from the Mori Art Museum to hold an exhibition, Chiharu Shiota learned the devastating news of cancer recurrence. She recalled, “Just living has already exhausted all my strength, and creating in this state became the core of the exhibition.”
The exhibition not only encompasses the artist’s first painting at the age of 5, but also the creations made during the days of battling illness, shrouded in anxiety and fear. From constantly exploring oneself in youth, feeling lost in a foreign land, to experiencing the physical trauma of miscarriage and cancer, she weaves various emotions into those overwhelming webs of lines. Chiharu Shiota believes that some emotions can only be expressed through creation, and she finds salvation in the process of others viewing her work. The pieces are silent, only those with similar experiences truly understand the deep emotions within.
During her university years, Chiharu Shiotani majored in oil painting, but later she found that she couldn’t feel her own existence in the two-dimensional world, so she shifted her focus to installation art. The painting she did as a child, “Butterflies Resting on Sunflowers,” was signed with the opposite name, as Shiotani had already started painting before she learned to write properly. After graduating, she realized there was a bigger world beyond painting, so in 1992 she created her final oil painting and moved towards the broader and truly her own field of installation art.
I once spent some time studying under the mother of performance art, Marina Abramović, which opened the door to creating art with my body. In “Becoming a Painting,” Chiharu Shiota splashed red porcelain glaze pigment onto her body, unlike regular pigment, porcelain glaze is difficult to wash off and corrosive. Her skin was burned, and she had to cut off some of her hair. It took three months to completely remove the red oil from her body. Despite the damage to her body, she felt a profound connection and realization between her body and the artwork for the first time. She continued to create with her body for a period of time.
The boat holds significant symbolic meaning in this exhibition, for artists, the boat is a vessel for pursuing ideals and distant places. “Where to Go” features dozens of white boats suspended in the air, the interwoven net structure symbolizes the dimension between the visible and the invisible, revealing the contradictory longing and fear of the unknown in each person. In “The Uncertain Journey,” 6 metal boats are situated in the exhibition space, with countless red lines extending upwards from the boats, symbolizing bloodlines, the lines intersect and entwine with each other, like the connections and bonds between people. It signifies that people are a community of fate on the journey to the unknown.
The inspiration for “In Silence” comes from when Yan Tian experienced a neighbor’s house fire at the age of 9. At that time, she saw a charred piano outside the door, but felt it was more beautiful than the original piano. The venue had some equally charred chairs, representing a concert. The black lines in the sky intertwined, like a silent symphony. For her, death is not the end, but continues to exist in the universe in a silent manner.
In cancer treatment, Yan Tian felt her body breaking down bit by bit. Turning pain into inspiration, she transformed her illness into artistic energy, creating “The Externalized Body” to showcase the agony of bodily disintegration. Yet, this terrifying pain has all been turned into beautiful visual art by her. She said, “I don’t want to hide cancer, I want to create art through it.”
“Chiharu Shiotani: Trembling Soul” exhibition goes far beyond a typical art exhibition, encompassing themes of life and death, soul, memory, trauma, and pursuit. In everyone’s life, there are always some indescribable love and pain, and those emotions that are difficult to express are liberated in the intricate threads. Shiotani turns the weight of life into a tension-filled web, healing not only the audience but also herself. To experience how the artwork can shake the soul, download the Taipei Fine Arts Museum APP now and enjoy this rare online tour!
Image source and learn more: Taipei Fine Arts Museum
