Japan Society presents Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries, the Berlin-based artist’s first solo museum exhibition in New York, running from September 12, 2025, through January 11, 2026. The exhibition opens 80 years after the end of World War II and features a new site-specific installation alongside significant works spanning Shiota’s career.
A Practice Built on Thread and Memory
Shiota has gained international recognition for immersive installations constructed from woven thread that transform intangible concepts like memory, connection, loss into physical form. Born in Osaka in 1972, she studied painting in Kyoto before relocating to Berlin in 1996, where she developed the distinctive visual language that now defines her practice.
Image Details: Chiharu Shiota. Photograph by Sunhi Mang, 2024 & Chiharu Shiota, Uncertain Journey, 2016. Photograph by Sunhi Mang. © ARS, New York, 2025 and the artist
The exhibition centers on Diary (2025), a new commission composed of red thread and replicated wartime diary pages. The work draws from literary scholar Donald Keene’s wartime translations of diaries left by Japanese soldiers, many of which concluded with requests in English that the diary be returned to their families. Shiota transforms this historical material into an environment that addresses both individual and collective memory.
Between Two Places
The titular installation Two Home Countries (2025) uses red thread to connect two metal house frames to a dress form, visualizing Shiota’s experience of living between Japan and Germany. Unlike her works exploring rupture or grief, this piece examines coexistence and the complexity of belonging to multiple places simultaneously.
Beyond my Body (2025), installed in the atrium, features suspended sheets of incised red suede stretched into net-like forms that suggest skin as a site of trauma and regeneration. The Cell series (2024-2025) includes delicate glass sculptures resembling internal organs encased in wire and thread, along with drawings of abstract cellular accumulations. These works emerged from Shiota’s experiences with ovarian cancer and motherhood.
From Performance to Installation
The exhibition traces Shiota’s trajectory from performance art to her current practice. Early documentation includes photographs from Becoming Painting (1994), while three videos, namely Bathroom (1999), Wall (2010), and Earth and Blood (2013) show how she used her body as both medium and subject, establishing the foundation for her spatial work with thread.
Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration
The exhibition coincides with KINKAKUJI (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion), a theatrical production marking Shiota’s North American stage design debut. Adapted from Yukio Mishima’s 1956 novel and developed with Leon Ingulsrud, former co-director of SITI Company, the production runs September 11-20. Following the performances, portions of the stage set will move into the gallery alongside sketches, projections, and footage documenting Shiota’s design process.
Exhibition Details
Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries is on view at Japan Society Gallery, 333 East 47th Street, New York.
Gallery hours are Tuesday-Friday, 11 am-5 pm, and Saturday-Sunday, noon-6 pm,
with free admission on First Fridays from 5-7 pm.
Shiota’s work appears in major collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, and 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan. She represented Japan at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 and received the Art Encouragement Prize from Japan’s Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in 2008.
Cover image: Chiharu Shiota, Wall, 2010. Performance Video: tube, red liquid. HD DSLR video, color, sound, 16:9, 3’39”. © ARS, New York, 2025 and the artist
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