Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles

The MAO Museum of Oriental Art presents “Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles”, curated by Mami Kataoka, director of the Mori Art Museum, and Davide Quadrio, director of MAO, with curatorial assistance from Anna Musini and Francesca Filisetti. This major monographic exhibition, shown for the first time in an Asian art museum, traces the entire artistic journey of Chiharu Shiota through drawings, photographs, sculptures, and her most celebrated immersive installations.
Shiota’s work, often rooted in personal experiences, explores the intangible realm of memories, emotions, dreams, and existential questions such as identity, human connection, life, and death. Her signature installations of interwoven red or black threads envelop architectural spaces, transforming them into suspended environments where fascination meets unease, movement meets stillness.
Conceived as one vast installation spreading across the museum’s spaces, the project enters into dialogue with MAO’s permanent collections and includes new site-specific works created for this occasion. Among the featured pieces are “Where Are We Going?” (2017), evoking uncertain futures; “Uncertain Journey” (2016), a network of vivid red threads and skeletal boats symbolising encounters at the end of each voyage; “In Silence” (2008), with a burnt piano enveloped in black threads, embodying the silence after destruction; “Reflection of Space and Time” (2018), meditating on presence and absence; “Inside – Outside” (2009), addressing the boundaries between East and West, inner and outer worlds; and “Accumulation – Searching for the Destination” (2021), a monumental installation of suspended suitcases symbolising memory, migration, and the universal journey of life.