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Lot Essay
Born in 1972 in Osaka, Chiharu Shiota is renowned for her dramatic immersive installation. She moved to Germany in 1997 to study under the performance art maven Marina Abramović, which provides a key to her pictorial language that is unmistakably oriented around the artistic solutions of the installation art of the 1970s. In 2015, she represented Japan Pavilion at the 56th International Art Exhibition of Venice art biennale.
Confronting fundamental human concerns like life and death, Shiota explores questions like “What does it mean to be alive?” and "What is existence?" in large- scale installations. Personal experience is central to Shiota's work. She clambers around in the skeins of our unconscious. "It would be nice to banish every trace of myself, my looks, my papers, my passport, and even my fingerprints," Shiota has said, "and only create my works in dialogue with the cosmos." She frequently utilises found objects such as clothing, shoes, old furniture, vintage suitcases and doors and windows from demolished and derelict buildings. Such items resonate with personal and emotional if elusive histories. Chiharu’s installations alter and energise the physical and architectural space, challenging our perceptions of the immediate environment and embracing the viewer as an intergral part of the experience. Her labyrinthine installations weave a complex web from exploring the hinterlands between waking life and dream states and chasing fading memories.
Confronting fundamental human concerns like life and death, Shiota explores questions like “What does it mean to be alive?” and "What is existence?" in large- scale installations. Personal experience is central to Shiota's work. She clambers around in the skeins of our unconscious. "It would be nice to banish every trace of myself, my looks, my papers, my passport, and even my fingerprints," Shiota has said, "and only create my works in dialogue with the cosmos." She frequently utilises found objects such as clothing, shoes, old furniture, vintage suitcases and doors and windows from demolished and derelict buildings. Such items resonate with personal and emotional if elusive histories. Chiharu’s installations alter and energise the physical and architectural space, challenging our perceptions of the immediate environment and embracing the viewer as an intergral part of the experience. Her labyrinthine installations weave a complex web from exploring the hinterlands between waking life and dream states and chasing fading memories.