Red Brick Art Museum distinguishes itself with its remarkable, extensive art exhibitions, and the current display is no exception. I recently returned to the museum to experience "Silent Emptiness," a captivating showcase of the exceptional Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota's work.
The Artist
Chiharu Shiota, born in Osaka, Japan, in 1972 and now residing in Berlin, examines themes such as connection, memory, identity, faith, the body, and absence from diverse angles in her creations. As stated in her online biography, her "inspiration frequently arises from personal experiences or emotions, which she broadens into universal human issues like life, death, and relationships." She has reinterpreted the ideas of memory and consciousness by gathering everyday objects including shoes, keys, beds, chairs, and dresses, enveloping them in vast thread structures. Through her installations, she explores the feeling of a ‘presence in the absence’ and conveys intangible emotions through her sculptures, drawings, performance videos, photographs, and canvases.
The Work
The exhibition opens with a timeline illustrating Shiota’s life, career, and artistic journey. Opposite this is the video installation Bathroom, a defining piece that introduces key concepts of Shiota’s work.
Next, we encounter the exhibition's initial collection of Shiota’s 2D artworks, some of which seem to be early explorations of the “Rooted Memories” theme that reappears later in the exhibit, rendered in water-soluble wax pastel, ink, and thread on paper.
Following this, we discover the first of several large-scale installations. Entering the room featuring Multiple Realities is like facing a challenge. Several towering, empty dresses dangle from the ceiling, slowly rotating above what looks like a shallow pool of water, with a winding path of stepping stones bisecting the room. Regarding the dresses, Shiota has remarked, “The dress symbolizes the empty body where the individual is absent.”
Multiple Realities establishes the exhibition's mood. The large-scale works boast a clear, deliberate aesthetic that, due to their cohesive and striking visual impact, engage the viewer physically, making them seem almost like an entity within the scenes.
With this perspective, we continue through the exhibit. Metamorphosis of Consciousness presents a dreamlike ambiance with its white, fiberoptic light display, gently undulating lights, fragile butterflies, and a solitary bed, evoking a sense of isolation and melancholy alongside its beauty.
Gateway to Silence highlights one of Shiota’s most notable elements: a dizzying mass of intertwining red threads that spread and twist throughout the space. At the center, an imposing Tibetan Buddhist doorframe serves as a quiet counterbalance to the chaotic burst of red.
The vibrant red threads in Gateway to Silence possess a powerful presence, breaking through walls, penetrating the space, and reaching out to engage with other installations and large photographs of past Shiota works in different settings.
Following is Echoes of Time, which swaps the red threads for black, replaces the wooden door with several large stones, and transforms the network of tangible connections into a disquieting web of space, time, and memory.
Rooted Memories is undoubtedly my favorite piece in the exhibition. A sizeable, decommissioned wooden boat from Xingtai, Hebei, rests silently on a mound of soil in the center of a vast area. Countless red threads hang from the ceiling, cascading down to fill the room, except for a clear space around the boat. It presents a stunning sight. Approaching the boat, one notices that a tree appears to have grown straight through its bottom, obscured by the shower of red threads.
As one nears the boat, it becomes clear that there are “paths” among the red threads, which create something akin to a forest as we move through them. These paths wind through the dense threads, at times drawing us closer to, and at other times moving us further from, the still boat, which remains anchored at the room’s core.
Connections in Ashes features an untidy array of chairs ensnared and suspended from the ceiling by Shiota’s threads. Get close enough, and you may also catch the scent of incense.
Another collection of 2D pieces titled Connected to the Universe consists of five images stitched and inked onto smaller canvas pieces. These works are gently and surprisingly poignant, showcasing a swirling, tangled mass of red, black, or green threads emanating from, surrounding, and impacting a small human figure. The stitched centers dwarf the human silhouettes, molding the canvas as the threads pull and crease, occasionally curving back to form the landscape around the figure—representing both our internal emotional reality and the universe's structure that shapes us.
The exhibition also includes video pieces. Among these, my favorite is Earth and Blood, featuring a series of six smaller screens that independently display looping videos of soil, a blood-like substance, and the artist applying this substance to
Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota impresses at the Red Brick Art Museum.
