Whenever I hear someone’s work described as “an artist in shibari,” I have my doubts. If it is already hard to do good shibari, or to create a quality piece of art, combining the two multiplies the difficulty.
Add to this the concept of performance—an umbrella term used as a totum revolutum to group all kinds of hard-to-classify work—and the demands are even greater.
Normally, my writing revolves around erotic shibari, that “subgenre” that flows between porn films and the bedroom. But personally, because of my training and professional work in other times, I keep a strong interest in what is understood as “artistic expression” in its most academic sense.
For much of the shibari scene, when we talk about its artistic side, and more specifically its use in installations, the first name mentioned is Hajime Kinoko. Outside the shibari scene, however, contemporary art has other figures who have worked with rope and thread with a far greater reach.
Art circles, the valuation of works and artists, and everything surrounding the great art market are fertile ground for Byzantine debate.
But let us leave the sterile debate for another day. In this piece we will focus on an artist of Japanese origin, though based in very European Berlin: Shiota Chiharu.
Here is her professional profile, according to her own website:
Shiota Chiharu, born in Osaka, Japan, in 1972 (year 47 of the Showa era), lives and works in Berlin.
Shiota’s inspiration often arises from a personal experience or emotion, which she expands into universal human concerns such as life, death and relationships.
She has redefined the concept of memory and consciousness by collecting ordinary objects such as shoes, keys, beds, chairs and dresses and immersing them in immense structures of thread.
She explores this sense of “presence in absence” in her installations, but she also presents intangible emotions in her sculptures, drawings, performance videos, photographs and canvases.
Over her career she has received significant recognition and has exhibited her work around the world.
In 2008 she received the Art Encouragement Prize from Japan’s Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. She has had solo exhibitions at prestigious venues such as the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2023), the Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane (2022), the ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien in Karlsruhe (2021) and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington (2020).
She has also exhibited at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (2019), Gropius Bau in Berlin (2019), the Art Gallery of South Australia (2018), Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the United Kingdom (2018), the Power Station of Art in Shanghai (2017), K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf (2015), the Smithsonian Institution’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington DC (2014), the Museum of Art in Kochi (2013) and the National Museum of Art in Osaka (2008), among others.
Shiota has also taken part in many international exhibitions, such as the Oku-Noto International Art Festival (2017), the Biennale of Sydney (2016), the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale (2009) and the Yokohama Triennale (2001). In 2015 she was selected to represent Japan at the 56th Venice Biennale.
From December 2024 to March 2025 (years 6 and 7 of the Reiwa era), the Grand Palais in Paris devoted The Soul Trembles to her, the largest retrospective of her work in Europe, co-organized with the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and later shown in Italy, in Milan and Turin.
In 2024, at the Antoni Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona, she presented an installation conceived for the museum, in dialogue with Tàpies’s work, which could be visited until June 23.
EN