Chiharu Shiota Journey 2016/2021 Metal Frame, Red Line Photo: Shaunley
Chiharu Shiota "Gathering - In Search of Home" 2014/2021 Luggage, Motor, Red Line Photography / Shaunley ◎ Brother
Exhibition: The Vibrating Soul
Duration: 2021.12.19-2022.3.6
Venue: Long Museum (West Bund)
In the post-epidemic situation, few foreign artists have led teams to China to do exhibitions in person, but Yantian Qianchun is an exception. In Shanghai, where exhibitions are piled up, there has not been an artist's solo exhibition for a long time that can bring people a sense of beauty and pain, while harvesting a kind of happiness and comfort of the soul, and the "trembling soul" has done it. Chiharu Shiota "paints" in the air with light lines, evoking the infinite tension of visual expression with an everyday and imaginative material and way.
When it was learned that the 2019 Shiota Chiharu exhibition "Fluttering Souls" at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo was going to tour Shanghai, this almost immediately became one of the most important expectations in the winter art world. The Tokyo Exhibition, which the artist prepared while battling illness, answered her reflections on the important issues of life she has experienced over the past 25 years, especially the location of the soul and the inquiry of life and death, which are more universal today, two years later.
The entire exhibition presents the artist's work from the 1990s to the present day: in addition to large-scale installations, there are sculptures, performance videos, photographs, paintings, materials related to stage guidance projects, as well as new works created by the artist especially for this touring exhibition, totaling about 80 groups of more than 100 pieces. This is also the first time that Yantian Chiharu's largest solo exhibition was presented in Chinese mainland.
Painting is a childhood dream
After 21 days of isolation and 4 days of on-site preparations for the museum, the artist himself admitted that because he lived in Germany, he had not met so many people of the same color for a long time. Like a frightened bird, she softly responds to the audience's questions and accepts interviews from various media, but behind her light expression and gentle appearance, what is revealed through the exhibition works is a very strong and powerful soul.
The fate of this period of association with art stems from the love of painting. Born in Osaka Prefecture in 1972 and raised in a box-making factory in Kishiwada City, Chiharu Shiota decided at the age of 12 not to do repetitive work and wanted to become a painter. When she was 5 years old, she drew spring flowers and butterflies with her name, and when she was in kindergarten, she took a paintbrush and smiled brightly on her face.
Chiharu Shiota's identification of painting was a dilemma after enrolling in the fine arts department of Kyoto Seigo University, which is also a problem that most artists face. In the opening dialogue, she recalled that "I feel that painting everything is imitating others", painting becomes art for art's sake, and I feel a pang of emptiness when I face myself. She couldn't even pick up a paintbrush, let alone express her emotions to the fullest.
At the age of 19, Yantian visited an exhibition by Magdalena Abakanovic, a Polish artist, an innovator of modern fiber art and the founder of soft sculpture, at the Museum of Modern Art, which may have had a profound impact on her, at least as a role model for a female artist at that time, and made her determined to study in Europe. Abakanovich's fiber device planted a seed in the heart of the salt pan.
From 1993 to 1994 she studied as an exchange student at the Australian National University's School of Art, where she began creating performance and installation art. The experience of living abroad opened her mind to herself, and she began to explore identity, existence, migration, skin, soul, life and death through creation.
1994's "From Genes to Genes" was Shiota's first performance art and installation using wool as a material, using red cardboard, cloth, etc. to create irregularly shaped cells, fixed to the ceiling with red wool, and connected to the ground by a strand of thread. As you can see from the name, genes, inheritance, and blood have become the themes of discussion.
Save the painting dilemma with the body
The performance art "Becoming a Painting" of the same year was a watershed moment for Shiota to get out of the painting dilemma, she was inspired by her dream of becoming a painting, draped herself with a canvas, and sprayed red glaze on her body, the toxic glaze stained her face and hair red, but also burned her skin, through this dangerous behavior, she tried to unlock the relationship between the body and the material, but also found the motivation and determination to create art.
In 1996, Shiota went to Europe to study, where she studied with performance master Marina Abramovich and installation master Rebecca Horn. At this stage, she began a series of performance art experiments, such as in 1997's "Try and Go Home", in which Shiota fell from a pit again and again, as if to express a futile effort to return through this act. In 1999's "The Bathroom," she rinsed herself over and over again in a bathtub with muddy water, but she couldn't get rid of the mud, just like she couldn't get rid of the memory of her skin and identity anyway.
Through the presence of the body, Chiharu Shiota challenges the limits of the experience. But after settling in Berlin, she began to focus her expression on the absent body and the non-existent existence. For the artist, the absence of the body does not mean that the body truly disappears, and the non-existence of the object does not mean the disappearance of memory. Just as the 9-year-old experienced a fire in a neighbor's house, after burning through, leaving a residual piano, the piano can no longer make a sound, but its broken beauty remains in the artist's mind forever, and thus created "In Silence". The silent concert, like the absence of the body, brings a stronger sense of presence in the imagination.
From body creation to thread creation
The artist uses everyday objects to express the memory that remains on it, and strengthens this sense of existence through memory. The artist also again uses thread as the material for creation, weaving this silent presence.
When she discovers that she has cancer, Shiota begins to explore the boundaries of life and death and the place of the soul in the work, and in "In Sleep", she bundles the space and the bed with black thread, weaving a deep dream. He filled the space behind the door with black lines and crossed the door, symbolizing the boundary between life and death.
The day after receiving the invitation to solo exhibition at the Mori Art Museum, Shiota received news of his cancer recurrence, and the two years of preparation for the exhibition were also the time when the artist was repeatedly exploring and thinking about the belonging of the soul while fighting the disease. Feeling the entanglement of life and the entanglement of relatives, the artist began to wonder whether the soul could be inherited, whether the body would continue to exist after it was separated, and in "The Externalized Body", she used cowhide and bronze to symbolize the fragments of her body, and answered this frightening question in advance in the way of artistic creation.
But when I was in the "Journey of the Unknown", which is immediately visible at the entrance of the "vibrating soul", I saw light lines moving freely in the air, sometimes entangled together, sometimes becoming a single one, connecting the sky and small boats. "The lines become tangled, intertwined, broken, and scattered. They constantly reflect my inner world, but they also express the various states of relationships between people. ”
I imagined the artist holding the thread ball, going back and forth and winding in this huge space. As she said, the inner emotions will also be immediately reflected in this "winding" process, when watching the space gradually filled with these connections, a line has not been traced back to the beginning and the end, as if to build a dream world, "At that moment, I feel as if I can glimpse the sky and touch the truth." The black thread is an extension of space, the night sky, the universe; the red thread is blood, life. The artist gets the freedom of the soul in his creation.
At this time, I learned that the feeling of being surrounded by this sense of vulnerability and strength at the same time is a feeling of happiness, just like the queue of about 200 suitcases in "Gathering - Seeking Home", they tremble slightly, just like the unknown excitement felt in the early morning before the trip, it is a feeling of experiencing the present, we may say, this may be the soul?
The Long Museum (West Bund) has a very large space and height, which is not so easy to plan and represent for a single artist's solo exhibition. This exhibition begins with the "Unknown Journey" installation, reviews the artist's experience, through the large-scale installation "Silence", after coming out to see the artist's stage design and creation materials, after coming to the second floor, and then passing through several installation works composed of daily objects, supplemented by the artist's paintings, ending with "Gathering - Searching for Home", a circle at the end, to the final "Where Will We Go?" 》。 This large-scale installation of the intention of a white ship expressed in a line is like a dreamlike wonderland, which reminds me of the ship in the fog in Kenji Mizoguchi's film "April Story", a flat leaf boat, everyone sleeps, I swing the oar alone, and the bitter sea crosses by boat. Chiharu Shiota is this paddle shaker, which makes people feel a pang of heartache for her.
The image is copyrighted by VG Bild-Kunst image in Bonn, Germany and Chiharu Shiota