Unmistakable, unmissable Chiharu Shiota, with her spiderweb of red threads rising from boats, connecting people, with her black strings enveloping a piano and dresses, indeed makes the soul tremble. Hers is a world of abstract art, eerily beautiful, at the same time deeply troubling.
Go and see her exhibition – The Soul Trembles – at the Grand Palais in Paris. Behold the works, wait, and allow the meaning to come before searching the info panels and catalogue for clues of what Chiharu Shiota had in mind. Honestly, leave the reading of meaning until you’ve let the images find a place in your mind to anchor, grow and whisper its message to you.
The red threads rising from the metal skeletons of boats bring flames to mind, but flames are not thin, interconnected threads. Are they a spider’s web and an elaborate trap? No, there is no radially symmetric form and no eight-eyed-arachnid lurking. They could be capillaries of blood as the choice of colour is never innocent in art. They could also be the beginnings of a cocoon or the remains of a cocoon, the red suggesting life. But the boats are empty. Did some life float out, metamorphosise, and become a chrysalis for whatever butterfly to hatch and part? The panels say nothing of metamorphosis. Is it a mycelium network? But in the air? Rising up? Possible, but creepy and Chiharu Shiota is not producing horror movies, despite some of her troubling pieces.
My first take was that the boats were funeral boats, such as practiced by the Vikings in Europe (and in the Philippines and Vietnam), with the red lines the thoughts and memories of the dead, their souls rising and reconnecting. On reflection, I prefer the boats as an image of the living us, each alive, a little at sea, a little alone, but deeply connected to others, representing the complexity of human relations – which attunes with the artist’s words. We are connected and the connections are complex.
The blood-red threads knitting together and enveloping us feels visceral as if we were in body tissues. The burnt piano and black strings feel fundamentally different, more as a disaster, a wake, a loss recognised and honoured. The dead instrument is a reminder of the burnt piano carcass left outside Chiharu Shiota’s neighbour’s house after a fire there when the artist was but nine years old. It also echoes an image from the Ukrainian abandoned city of Pripyat, next to Chernobyl following the nuclear reactor disaster. Chiharu Shiota’s piano, with its charred keys, will never play again, the chairs are empty. There is an immense, powerful, utter silence.
Our first skin is the human skin. Clothes are our second skin, said Chiharu Shiota. Memories age our clothes, etch into our skin and bodies. Her seven-metre-long dresses are forever cleaned under showerheads but remain sullied by mud. We dream of washing away the dirt, but life happens, mistakes are made by us, to us, and traces of the past remain. One can never erase the memories of the skin.
Chiharu Shiota also sees a third skin: …made of the places we live, our walks, our doors, our windows that surround the human being. This she explores in Reflection of Space and Time (2018) and Inside Outside (2008/24) below. The first is to me a dark piece of a wedding dress captured and held by the dark strings. The work feels like a missed wedding and the black strings thoughts of an opportunity lost that accumulated over the years, anchoring the missed moment in a type of time stasis. The dress, however, looks clean white, the form full. It remains, years after, a statement of a powerful moment of hope. Just because it was in the past doesn’t erase it.
A thousand windows, and million glances through.Windows are made to be looked through, and not by one person, but an opportunity for all. A window replaced after forty, fifty years has had how many people look through them? How many things have been seen, events witnessed? A window is private at one level, for a person, a family looking out. Or inside. But a thousand windows? A community, a people, a collective. Each window is like a cell in an insect’s compound eye, capturing a fragment of a whole. What does it see and feel – a thousand windows with glances decade after decade? A million moments. Easily.
Here Shiato presents us Berlin. A city with a complicated history, a complex history, of the worst of humanity and the shame of it all, the banality of evil, but also amazing moments, private moments, public moments. The wall fell, there was hope in a place that had created despair. The assembly of windows asks us to remember, to travel in time, to imagine what was seen through all those windows, In these times of war and fear, our leaders could usefully look at this exhibition and ask what a thousand eyes are going to see and remember of what they do. What are the leaders responsible for? The world will watch and not forget.
Migrating suitcases journey, held up by the red threads of life. They are old leather suitcases, making me think of the exodus from East Berlin to West, and the earlier the exodus from Berlin and those fleeing conflicts today, underlining how we have learnt so little from history. The red is the colour of life, and of life that flowed away. Wait, the suitcases sway lightly on their celestial anchors, and they rise into the sky. Is this a statement of a dream of a better life, full of hope, even after a difficult or even impossible choice to leave?
The title suggests things we accumulate and we leave only with the the essential and particularly precious parts of our lives, each item with a personal meaning for us. This work means many things.
I’ve only covered six of Chiharu Shiota’s works, while there were a hundred – of her with pulsing tubes of white and red, capillaries on the outside, of a thousand toys connected, of her painted in blood red, photographed, herself become the art work, of the films showing her theatre piece productions, sets for operas. Go. The exhibition is open until 19 March 2025 at the Grand Palais. See also the beautiful catalogue with great pictures, of course, stitched with red thread. As I was leaving, what lingered, lingers still, is a web, a chrysalis. I like that. But where are the creatures inside? I thought they were gone, but were they perhaps not gone, but here, walking through and step by step metamorphosising, growing, feeding in the art cocoon of Chiharu Shiota’s mind, and emerging, a little metamorphosised. Do we have new wings to explore the world thanks to this Chiharu Shiota’s exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris?
