Chiharu Shiota

This compact, gorgeously produced clothbound monograph offers a striking visual and critical exploration of the work of the acclaimed Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota (born 1972), who works across sculpture, performance, drawing and installation. The artist is best known for her immersive, thread-based installations. These poetic environments—woven from vast networks of red, black or white yarn—have captivated audiences around the world, evoking themes of memory, absence and the body. Featuring a newly commissioned essay by curator Yung Ma and an in-depth interview with the artist by the novelist and poet Yoko Tawada, Threads of Life presents previously unpublished photographs of recent works. Foregrounding Shiota's woven installations through numerous full-bleed images, the volume also displays the artist's new series of drawings, spotlighting an underappreciated facet of her practice.

A wide-ranging and complex project of great expressive power, this volume retraces the entire production of Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota (born 1972) across drawings, photographs, sculptures and some of her most famous environmental and monumental installations. Often inspired by personal experiences, Shiota's works explore intangible thoughts, offering spaces for silence and contemplation on universal, existential concepts such as identity, relationships, life and death. Transcending the boundaries of time and space, her works engage the most intimate and vulnerable part of the human being. Her most famous installations, composed of red or black threads woven together to create imposing structures, envelop the spaces in which they are located, transforming their volumes and guiding the viewer into an immersive experience in which fascination alternates with unease, movement with stasis.

This extensive monograph documents the work of the Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota (born 1972), who has created a distinctive and enthralling body of work—including drawings, sculptures and installations—rarely equalled for its depth and universality. The book is published on the occasion of the inaugural exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris and in conjunction with the new partnership between Skira and Chargeurs Museum Studio, its mother house, with the Grand Palais Immersif. More than a retrospective, this book is a comprehensive excursion into the daily life and work of this exceptional artist and provides a rare backstage glimpse of the mesmerizing, immersive installations and environments for which she is celebrated. Complete with abundant illustrations, an intimate interview and an insightful essay, this book explores the bold experimentation and rigorous critical thinking that lie behind Shiota’s masterful works.

Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota (born 1972) has gained international renown following the presentation of her installation for the Japan Pavilion at the Biennale in Venice in 2015. Everyday objects, mementos and objets trouvés define the artist’s pictorial language and the themes of her oeuvre, in their evocations of memorialization, homesickness, migration, mortality and life. Her well-known installations with wool threads include such items as old suitcases and shoes, keys, pieces of clothing, furniture and letters, which she also integrates into her performances.

In this overview, photographs, film stills, drawings, prints and objects from the artist’s archive comprehensively document the developments in Shiota’s oeuvre and illustrate her (mostly site-specific, temporary) installations. The book is published on the occasion of the first retrospective of the Berlin-based artist and concentrates on her work of the last 20 years.