Chiharu Shiota, a Japanese installation artist, born in Osaka, Japan (1972), lives and works in Berlin.In 2008, she received the Art Encouragement Prize from the Japanese Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. In 2015, selected to represent Japan at the 56th Venice Biennale. Confronting fundamental human concerns such as life, death and relationships, Chiharu Shiota explores human existence throughout various dimensions by creating an existence in the absence either in her large-scale thread installations that include a variety of common objects and external memorabilia or through her drawings, sculptures, photography and videos.

Chiharu Shiota’s inspiration often emerges 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 engulfing them in immense thread structures. She explores this sensation of a‘presence in the absence’with her installations but also presents intangible emotions in her sculptures, drawings, performance videos, photographs, and canvases.

For Chiharu Shiota it is not as important to create work that tells personal stories of people or places as it is to create an environment that provokes thought and acts as an emotional catalyst. Each element of the installation is meant to trigger subjective responses, provoking remembrance and/or contemplation. The everyday nature of the furniture, as with the numbers in that they are almost a part of everybody’s individual human experiences, grants them a clairvoyant quality which allows the installation to channel into each member of the audience some personal truth.