Chiharu Shiota: Spaces of Memory Woven in Silence
In an era where art is often seen as abstract and symbolic, there’s one artist who stands in stark contrast: Carole Feuerman. She’s a leading figure in the hyperrealism movement, a style of art so lifelike that it demands a second look to confirm that it isn’t real. This quality makes her work particularly captivating for many, especially the younger generation.
Carole Feuerman is an American sculptor who has been active since the 1970s. What truly sets her apart, though, is not just her decades-long career but her extraordinary ability to create sculptures so realistic that they seem poised to come to life at any moment. Her works can be found in prestigious collections and museums worldwide, and she has received numerous awards for her contributions to the art world.
Chiharu Shiota is an artist of in-between states — between East and West, between the body and memory, between the visible and the invisible. Born in Osaka, Japan, in 1972 and based in Berlin for over two decades, she has developed a deeply personal artistic language. Her installations, made of dense webs of red, black, or white thread, are often interwoven with everyday objects: chairs, keys, shoes, boats, clothing.
The Red Thread as Lifeline
Shiota’s materials are simple — yarn, mostly — but she transforms them into emotional architecture. The red thread symbolizes blood, connection, memory, and loss. Much of her work is autobiographical. A serious illness early in life shaped her understanding of the body’s fragility. That moment of physical vulnerability pushed her from painting toward installation — and toward a need to make the invisible visible.
In an interview, she once said:
"I wanted to be a painter. But when I became ill, I couldn't paint anymore. It felt like color wasn't enough. I had to enter the space."
That move into the third dimension became her artistic signature.
Body, Memory, Absence
The objects Shiota incorporates into her thread works bear traces of human life. A worn dress suggests not just a person, but their absence. Shoes tell of paths once walked. Old keys hint at lost homes. Her spaces feel like chambers of memory — places where the personal and the collective are interwoven.
The threads themselves are not just about connection but also about containment. They stretch across rooms like networks of neurons or veins, like thoughts or dreams. They enclose, they hold — and at the same time, they leave space for what is missing.
Between Japan and Berlin
Shiota’s cultural roots play a subtle but central role in her work. The Japanese aesthetic of impermanence — the concept of Wabi-Sabi, the beauty of the imperfect and the transient — is deeply embedded in her art. At the same time, her work is influenced by Western traditions. In Berlin, she studied under Marina Abramović, whose performance-based practice shaped Shiota’s understanding of the body and presence in space.
Yet Shiota is not a political artist in the conventional sense. Her approach is poetic, personal, and universal. Themes such as death, memory, identity, and connection are central — not as declarations, but as open-ended questions.
Art as Inner Space
Shiota was featured at the Venice Biennale — but her work transcends any single location. Whether exhibited in museums, churches, or theater spaces, her installations always offer intimate, deeply felt experiences. They are not only physically entered — they are emotionally inhabited. They invite us to pause, to listen, to feel.
Her art may be quiet, but it calls out for remembrance. It captures what has been lost, and spins it forward — like an invisible thread between past and present, between you and me.