Cover Japanese thread artist Chiharu Shiota with her installation ‘Infinite Memory’ at M+ (Photo: Tatler Hong Kong/Zed Leets)
Japanese thread artist Chiharu Shiota with her installation ‘Infinite Memory’ at M+ (Photo: Tatler Hong Kong/Zed Leets)
1 / 1
A cancer survivor, a mother and a woman: Japanese thread artist Chiharu Shiota reflects on her many hats that led her to create her latest work, inspired by blood, in Hong Kong.
Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota walks into the Focus Gallery at Hong Kong’s visual culture Museum M+, where her installation, Infinite Memory, a newly commissioned work this year, fills the small space with a sea of her signature red threads. Three crimson dresses hang high in midair, as if they were overpowering floating phantoms, tangled in the web of threads, staring down at the quiet artist, who, wearing a simple black dress, looks like a shadow shrivelled up in a corner.
With a composed aura, Shiota doesn’t have a lot to say, not even in her own mother tongue of Japanese. One can hardly decipher her thoughts and emotions; she obediently follows the photographer’s instructions to “smile, but not too much”, “chin up” or “look sideways”.
Her art, in contrast, speaks volumes. While she doesn’t provide explicit instructions or interpretations for her piece, a haunting, imposing feeling of awe, fear or discomfort creeps up once one enters the space and looks up at the towering red figures. “Normally, blood stays inside us, but here it’s like the body has been turned inside out,” she says to Tatler. “Everything in our blood, like family, race, nationality and religion, is shown on the outside. We don’t choose these things; they are with us from birth. Sometimes these connections give us comfort, but they can also hold us back and stop us from moving forward.”
Above Japanese thread artist Chiharu Shiota with her installation ‘Infinite Memory’ at M+ (Photo: Tatler Hong Kong/Zed Leets)
Japanese thread artist Chiharu Shiota with her installation ‘Infinite Memory’ at M+ (Photo: Tatler Hong Kong/Zed Leets)
1 / 1
The dresses, she describes, are “a second skin [that says] more about us than our real skin. Clothes go beyond skin colour, age, gender or nationality. What we wear carries our memories, and those memories are part of who we are.”
Her installation is part of Dream Rooms: Environments by Women Artists 1950s–Now, a group exhibition at M+ that runs until January 18, 2026. Originally presented at Munich’s Haus der Kunst, the show features 12 environment artworks (now more commonly known as “site-specific installations”) by trailblazing women artists from Asia, Europe, and North and South America from the 1950s to the present. This Hong Kong version also includes Shiota’s and two other Asian artists’ newly commissioned installations.
Above Japanese thread artist Chiharu Shiota with her installation ‘Infinite Memory’ at M+ (Photo: Tatler Hong Kong/Zed Leets)
Japanese thread artist Chiharu Shiota with her installation ‘Infinite Memory’ at M+ (Photo: Tatler Hong Kong/Zed Leets)
1 / 1
The 1960s and 70s marked a time when environmental consciousness was growing worldwide, fuelling a new wave of artistic creations addressing the relationship between humans and nature. However, due to the transient nature of many land art pieces and the male-dominated art industry, many female environmental artists were not given the recognition they deserved. Marina Pugliese, director of the Museum of Cultures, Intercultural Projects and Public Art, City of Milan, who co-curated the M+ show, says they wanted to spotlight female artists. “We are not gender studies scholars, and we were not meant to do an exhibition just on women, but when we selected the artworks, we realised that the contribution by women was incredible,” she explains.
The exhibition encompasses different kinds of works: some essentialist, discussing the female body, the vagina, the experience of being penetrated or giving birth; others are abstract; some are in between, such as Argentine conceptual artist and performer Marta Minujín’s Room for Making Love (1963).
“It’s quite fascinating to be part of this exhibition,” Shiota says. “I didn’t know many women artists who created large installations which included the audience in the space, especially in the 1960s and 70s [and] when I was growing up [in the 1970s and 80s].” Despite the cultural and temporal gap, the Japanese artist feels connected to the other exhibiting artists. “Many of their works are about birth, and they make visitors feel like they are being born when they go in and then come out again.”
Above Japanese thread artist Chiharu Shiota (Photo: Tatler Hong Kong/Zed Leets)
Japanese thread artist Chiharu Shiota (Photo: Tatler Hong Kong/Zed Leets)
1 / 1
Shiota, too, draws inspiration from her personal experiences as a woman and mother: diagnosed with an aggressive form of ovarian cancer in 2005, she was filled with fear and dread, worrying that she would leave her then nine-year-old daughter motherless. Twelve years later, she was at the height of her career, and a day after the director of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, Mami Kataoka, invited her to do a solo show at the museum, her doctor informed her that the cancer had returned. “I had to prepare the Mori exhibition while also having surgery and chemotherapy,” she recalls. “It was an incredibly hard time, and I thought a lot about death and where the soul goes.”
This experience ultimately inspired her iconic exhibition The Soul Trembles at Mori Art Museum in 2019, where her video installation captures the responses of children the same age as her daughter to questions about the soul. The piece was viewed by 660,000 people that year alone. It has been on tour since, with the upcoming show at Turin’s Museum of Oriental Art marking its ninth destination, and it will go to Canada next year.
Read more: How Hong Kong Breast Cancer Foundation’s chair turned a cancer diagnosis into strength
Above ‘The Soul Trembles’ by Japanese thread artist Chiharu Shiota at the Grand Palais in Paris (Photo: Instagram/@chiharushiota)
‘The Soul Trembles’ by Japanese thread artist Chiharu Shiota at the Grand Palais in Paris (Photo: Instagram/@chiharushiota)
1 / 1
Her other works are also personal, occasionally incorporating local elements that inspire her creative process, such as gondolas when she was exhibiting at the Venice Biennale. However, threads have been a constant since her 20s, when she studied at the Australian National University as an exchange student. Before this, she majored in painting at Kyoto Seika University but gradually felt that painting didn’t reflect her identity. “It was just colours on a canvas, and I couldn’t find any meaning in it,” she says. “Making art is always about exploring my identity and my world, but when I was still painting, everything I made felt like someone else’s work.”
She experimented with other materials, and her graduation performance-installation featuring strings, From DNA to DNA (1994), laid the foundation for her signature style. “I usually work with a single thread, which is like a pencil line,” she explains. “I find meaning in this material because it shows my feelings.” Today, her art spans gallery and museum installations, stage sets and performance art. Threads provide her with a constant. “The creative process is basically the same across all genres. I feel like I’m still making drawings, just in three dimensions.”
There’s no limit to where her net sprawls. Coming up, she is interested in exploring the connection between literature and art. “I really enjoyed collaborating with Japanese novelist Yoko Tawada. I drew an image for every page she wrote. I’m now thinking about new ways to combine our realms, even though I’m not sure exactly how yet,” she says. With that, she leaves the world tangled in her enchanting web of thoughts.
NOW READ
Credits
Photography: Zed Leets
Photography Assistant: Carlos Hui
Topics
Zabrina is the Senior Editor, Arts and Culture of Tatler Hong Kong. She specialises in performing arts, visual art and film. Her wanderlust was first fuelled by the Mighty Rovers Antarctica Expedition 2010. Over the years, she has interviewed A-list artists and filmmakers, including Oscar winners Chlóe Zhao and Tim Yip, Golden Horse winner Sylvia Chang, In the Mood for Love cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Pachinko author Min Jin Lee, and Coachella’s first Chinese solo singer Jackson Wang. She won gold at the WAN-IFRA Asian Media Awards for her 2021 feature on the waves of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans.
