Chiharu Shiota (born in Osaka in 1972) is an internationally active artist based in Berlin. Having graduated from the Oil Painting Department at Kyoto Seika University, in 1996, Shiota decided to relocate to Germany and study with Marina Abramovic at the Braunschweig University of Art. In the interim, she has developed a wealth of artistic expressions and participated in countless international exhibitions. Shiota's works include installations in which she stretched string across an exhibition space and one in which she combined a variety of windows that she had collected from condemned buildings and deserted houses in the former East Berlin as well as video pieces that make use of her own body. In Japan, Shiota's work "Memory of Skin," consisting of giant, dirt-stained dresses, received a great deal of attention when it was shown at the first Yokohama Triennale in 2001. Since then, Shiota's work has continued to receive acclaim both in Japan and abroad, and has been shown at the Sixth Gwangju Biennale in 2006 and in a solo exhibition at the Kanagawa Prefectural Gallery in 2007. Last year she also received the Sakuya Konohana Award and the Japanese Education, Science, and Technology Minister's Art Encouragement Prize for Best New Artist.
In her work, Shiota often makes use of tangled yarn, cracked windows, worn-out shoes, and burned pianos. While on the one hand, these objects fill us with a disquieting sense of repulsion, they also seem to call up memories from the past that have accumulated with the passage of time. Shiota's work simultaneously imparts a fear of death and the vigor of life through ordinary objects that we are completely accustomed to seeing − it is this ambiguity that makes the works so enthralling. Along with an installation created from old shoes collected from the general public which has never been shown before in Japan, in this exhibition, we present the creative world of Chiharu Shiota as seen in bed and string installations, huge, dirt-stained dresses, a work in which string was strewn across an iron frame and the artist's films and photographs.