Installation view of Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries at Japan Society Gallery, New York, 2025. Photo by Waso Danilenko
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Staff Writer
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March 27, 2026
This April, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco is opening an exciting new exhibit featuring the work of Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota. The exhibit, Two Home Countries, will feature red thread woven into massive networks inside the museum, creating an immersive exhibition.
Two Home Countries will open at the Asian Art Museum on April 3 to July 20, 2026, inside the Yang Yamazaki Pavilion, the museum’s largest gallery. The exhibit includes four sections and explores themes of memories, identity, and absence. Along with the intertwined red threads, you can expect to see handwritten diary pages, written by Japanese soldiers during WWII and German civilians post-war.
“Chiharu Shiota’s work resonates because it makes emotional states visible,” said Soyoung Lee, The Barbara Bass Bakar Director and CEO of the Asian Art Museum. “Her installations speak to the experience of living between places, histories, and identities — an experience that feels increasingly familiar to many people today.”
Installation view of Chiharu Shiota_ Two Home Countries at Japan Society Gallery, New York, 2025. Photo by Waso Danilenko
Chiharu Shiota was born in Osaka and studied art at Kyoto Seika University. Since 1996, she has lived and worked in Berlin, Germany, and is known for performance art, sculpture, and large-scale installations.
“When I am in Germany, I miss Japan, and when I return to Japan, I miss Germany,” Shiota has said. “It is an in-between sensation.”
Visitors are invited to move through the web of red threads woven into complex canopies above, thrust into Shiota’s exploration of living in two countries and themes of belonging and identity.
Chiharu Shiota, Inner Home, 2024. Metal frame, wire, beads. Photograph by Sunhi Mang. © ARS, New York, 2025. Courtesy of the Asian Art Museum
The exhibition will open on April 3, and requires a special exhibition ticket that will also grant general admission to the rest of the museum’s galleries. The temporary exhibit will close on July 20, 2026.
You can learn more about the exhibit and buy tickets to the Asian Art Museum here.