{"id":263225,"date":"2026-04-11T23:47:13","date_gmt":"2026-04-11T23:47:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/263225\/"},"modified":"2026-04-11T23:47:13","modified_gmt":"2026-04-11T23:47:13","slug":"chiharu-shiota-drops-jaws-at-the-asian-art-museum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/263225\/","title":{"rendered":"Chiharu Shiota drops jaws at the Asian Art Museum."},"content":{"rendered":"

To artist Chiharu Shiota, yarn is a connective tissue. She uses it to string together opposing forces\u2014past and present, the internal and external\u2014in webs that appear delicate and fluid but are, in fact, steely and immobile. <\/p>\n

Like arteries, the work in the new Asian Art Museum exhibition Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries pulses somewhere between the grotesque and beautiful, the unfathomable and the quotidian.<\/p>\n

\"\"\/ Japanese German artist Chiharu Shiota(Sunhi Mang, 2024)<\/p>\n

In Shiota\u2019s work, \u201cthere\u2019s a recurring theme of the way in which we perceive memory and traumatic experience, and how each of us grows from that experience,\u201d explains chief curator Robert Mintz. It\u2019s a theme that Diary, the womb-like immersive installation that opens the show, thrusts visitors deeply inside. <\/p>\n

Shiota used 20 miles of red yarn to weave together Diary\u2019s tunnels. In its latticework, she suspended historical ephemera like snowflakes\u2014pages from the diaries of fallen Japanese soldiers in World War II combined with personal objects from the same era found at flea markets in Berlin. Collected together, they become a profoundly intimate archive of human experience that reveals what happens when memories are untethered from those who made them.<\/p>\n

Chiharu Shiota describes her signature style as three-dimensional drawing, a medium she invented after becoming disillusioned with the restrictions of painting. Over her nearly thirty-year career, it’s allowed the artist to confront the contradictions and tragedies of life while simultaneously drawing out their universality. <\/p>\n

\u201cMy work is about birth and life and death,\u201d the artist has said, a deeply personal approach that Mintz says is somewhat unusual among artists from the Japanese diaspora. <\/p>\n

Shiota was born in Osaka in 1972 but has spent most of her adult life in Berlin. It was there that she gave birth to her daughter, there that she lost an unborn child, there that she survived two bouts of ovarian cancer. In the exhibition, she captures those experiences in thread and wire and rope and leather\u2014always in red, a color of significance in many East Asian cultures: Beyond My Body encapsulates the feeling of being physically stuck by illness with an active mind that is still able to disconnect and reach outside; in the Cells series, she imagines the alien entities of the cancerous bodies inside of her.<\/p>\n

\"\"\/ Installation view of ‘Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries’ at Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 2026. (\u00a9\ufe0f Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, photograph by Kevin Candland)<\/p>\n

Several examples of Shiota\u2019s work as a performance artist explore similar themes, revealing publicly what\u2019s more often kept hidden on the inside. In Wall, the artist lies on the floor wrapped in vein-like plastic tubing that fills and empties of blood, a substance that contains everything from heritage and nationality to identity and personality, says Mintz. <\/p>\n

In the black-and-white Bathroom, Shiota sits in a tub as mud dribbles down her face and neck, communicating the sense that we can never be completely cleansed of what came before. \u201cYour skin always remembers the dirt,\u201d Mintz explains.<\/p>\n

At the exhibition\u2019s center is its namesake Two Home Countries, two houses without walls in which wire fistulas are coiled like the organs of the body, one representing Shiota\u2019s native country of Japan, the other her adopted country of Germany. The two houses are separated not just by geographical distance; they illustrate the alienation of missing one home while visiting the other, of never fully belonging or feeling whole.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe revels in the disruption,\u201d says Mintz. \u201cJoy and sorrow are always embedded in her work.\u201d<\/p>\n

That eternal juxtaposition is not cathartic; it\u2019s not meant to be. Shiota offers no answers to soothe or explain the highs and lows of the human condition. Instead, her work embodies the uncertainty of life and the pain of remembering. <\/p>\n

As she herself puts it: \u201cfear is necessary to make art.\u201d<\/p>\n

\/\/ \u2018Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries’ is on display at the Asian Art Museum through July 20th; 200 Larkin St. (Civic Center), asianart.org<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"\/ Installation view of ‘Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries’ at Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 2026. (\u00a9\ufe0f Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, photograph by Kevin Candland)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To artist Chiharu Shiota, yarn is a connective tissue. She uses it to string together opposing forces\u2014past and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":263226,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[17775,9834,115534,115533,115537,115536,101,103,102,104,106,105,115535],"class_list":{"0":"post-263225","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-francisco","8":"tag-art-exhibit","9":"tag-asian-art-museum","10":"tag-asian-art-museum-sf","11":"tag-chiharu-shiota","12":"tag-japanese-artist","13":"tag-new-art-exhibit-san-francisco","14":"tag-san-francisco","15":"tag-san-francisco-headlines","16":"tag-san-francisco-news","17":"tag-sf","18":"tag-sf-headlines","19":"tag-sf-news","20":"tag-sf-museum"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263225\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/263226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}