Japan Society Gallery presents the first New York solo museum exhibition of contemporary artist Chiharu Shiota (b. 1972). Commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries centers on a newly commissioned, site-specific installation that explores wartime experiences and memories. Placing the original installation in dialogue with other works from Shiota’s oeuvre, the exhibition creates parallels between the humanitarian tragedy of war and the artist’s personal struggles, including confronting her mortality and her bicultural identity living between two home countries. By drawing connections between collective and personal experience and memory, the exhibition contemplates universal issues such as history, humanity, loss, time, space, the body, and national identity.
The exhibition also documents the conceptualization and creative process behind Shiota’s stage set designed for Japan Society’s theater commission KINKAKUJI (Temple of the Golden Pavilion), which will premiere on the opening night of the exhibition. Based on the novel by legendary Japanese author Yukio Mishima (1925–1970), the performance celebrates the centennial year of his birth. This new work brings Shiota’s innovative and deeply intimate stage design to American audiences for the first time.
About Chiharu Shiota:
Chiharu Shiota (b. 1972) is a contemporary artist best known for her site-specific, ephemeral installations in which fragments of memory are woven within webs of yarn that consume entire exhibition spaces. Shiota studied painting in Japan before training in performance art in Berlin, where she continues to live and work today. Her performances often present her physical body as a canvas, coating it in red paint or smearing it with earth. In contrast, her yarn installations allude to an absent body, with lines of thread representing intangible emotions, memories, and human connections all tangled together. Shiota has exhibited widely, including at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2025); Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka (2024), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2019); Gropius Bau, Berlin (2019); and National Museum of Asian Art, Washington DC (2014). In 2015, Shiota represented Japan at the 56th Venice Biennale. Her works are in numerous collections, including Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg, Germany; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Te Papa Tongerewa – The Museum of New Zealand, Wellington; Toronto Museum of Art; and 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan. Since 2003, Shiota has designed stage sets for performances at major theaters, including the Grand Théâtre de Genève in Geneva (2024), Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels (2011), and New National Theatre in Tokyo (2009).
For more information visit the Japan Society website.
Tagged 24/11.