Rotwand is delighted to present the first solo exhibition in Zurich of the Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota.

“Meine Heimat ist, wo ich Kunst schaffen kann”. (Chiharu Shiota)

Chiharu Shiota (*1972 in Osaka, Japan) has attracted international attention these past years with her stupendous and simultaneously filigree works that are muted installations. Far eastern meditation, western and eastern performance art and calligraphy all flow into her art, which takes up existential conditions expressed in her own aesthetic vocabulary.

For Rotwand, Chiharu Shiota has created a spatial installation that engenders an ambivalent feeling in the viewer between fascination and irritation and that works it, so to speak, into a force field. In a meditative act of self-absorption, the 36-year old artist has spun an everyday table, chair and books spread over table and ground into a filigree cocoon of black wool yarn that—from ceiling to floor, from wall to wall—makes a thousand links with their surroundings visible; as it were, a network that connects the thing-world with the immaterial. Despite the lack of a single person, there are traces of human existence in evidence, the struggles, wishes and dreams that define our being. Like an insect caught in a web or suspended in a protective shroud—viewers settle on different associations according to their standpoint.

The work “A Long Day” is a continuation of Shiota’s studies on the relation between human existence and the world, on the cycle of birth, life, suffering and death. As with “During Sleep” (Museum of Art Lucerne, 2002) and “In Silence” (Centre Pasquart, Bienne 2008), Shiota’s quest for what determines our existence becomes tangible. In a certain sense, all these works evoke Buddhist concepts, according to which human existence is resolved in a union with the world. In addition to the installations, also her objects, drawings and texts revolve around existential themes such as homelessness, loneliness and being cast into the world.

With subtle low-tech means, the Japanese artist succeeds in a powerful visualization of states of mind. The relationship between the individual and his environs, past and present, dream and trauma, condenses into the current work presented at Rotwand in a—literally—spellbinding three-dimensional aspect.
Chiharu Shiota’s works recall Eva Hesse’s mesh of twine; they deploy Jackson Pollock’s all-over and, at the same time, evoke the expressiveness of Asian calligraphy. Both transcultural experience and her studies under Marina Abramovic fuel her strong space- and volume-related works.

Text by Brigitte Ulmer

(from the German by Jeanne Haunschild)