Japanese performance and installation artist, Chiharu Shiota: Drawing Memories in the Air

Trace of Memory, The Mattress Factory, 2013 (Photo: Priyanka Sacheti)

I remember being thoroughly enchanted the first time I encountered Japanese installation and performance artist, Chiharu Shiota's work, Trace of Memory at The Mattress Factory, a contemporary art museum in Pittsburgh. I had been wanting to visit this curiously named museum all throughout the time I had been living there but I only managed to make time just a couple of days before I left the city - and am I glad I did! I had been primarily interested in dropping by the museum to see the work of another Japanese artist, Yasoi Kusama, whose signature polka dot + infinity mirror installation works were one of the museum's most exciting and fun spaces and which I regularly saw popping up on my Instagram feed. However, I returned from the museum visit, having become a big Chiharu Shiota fan instead and subsequently eagerly read up on her large, varied body of work. Almost a year later, I have been fortunate enough to personally interact with the artist when I recently. blogged about her work at Her Blueprint, where I regularly write about international women artists. Read on to find out more...

Chiharu Shiota's Mattress Factory installation utilised both the spatial landscape of an abandoned 19th century row house as well as specific objects such as a wedding dress, hospital bed, and a pile of suitcases and which she enmeshed it all in intricate black wool-thread creations. Everything was visible and yet, not; it was not unlike cobwebs studding the dusty corners of an abandoned house, simultaneously representing decay and life. In a sense, Shiota's work resurrects an otherwise dead house, creating a physically tangible web of narratives through the confluence of thread, space, and air. Perhaps, enchanted was also an appropriate word to describe my engagement with her work, for there was a fairy-tale, other-worldly quality to her work that I had never previously witnessed or experienced elsewhere. Researching further and talking with the artist herself, I discovered that the wool-thread is a signature motif of her work and through which she quite literally binds memories, past, people, and objects.

Born in Osaka, Japan, Chiharu moved to Berlin, Germany in 1997, where she studied with Marina Abramovic and Rebecca Horn, forerunners of the performance art movement; she has exhibited all over the world, presenting her installation art in both solo and group exhibitions.

What does installation art specifically mean to her? “I love empty spaces; the minute I come across one such as an abandoned building or an empty exhibition space, I feel as if my body and spirit transcend a certain dimension - and I can then start from scratch,” Chiharu says, presenting the abandoned or blank exhibition space as one void of references or associations and which she is subsequently free to re-interpret and realise her imagined worlds in. What particularly excites her about installation art is the immediacy of communication and engagement with the viewer. “[The viewers] can immediately feel as to what I am trying to show...unlike a painting or sculpture where you may have to engage with it for quite a while before distilling its meaning,” she opines.

While her work is largely rooted in the soil of her personal memories and concerned with theme of remembering and oblivion, it also sprouts and entwines itself with larger collective memories as well; one glimpses it in installations such as Dialogue from DNA in Krakow, Poland and which was subsequently recreated in Germany and Japan. Currently living and working in Germany, Chiharu reminisces about how it is linked to the time she returned to Japan three years after moving to Germany. "I wore my old shoes and experienced a curious situation; they didn't fit me any more even though they were the same size. This sense of dislocation persisted even when I was interacting with my parents and old friends. Nothing specifically had changed - and yet, I felt differently about them," she says.

The scenario made her start thinking about the gulf between the idealised memories when one is away from the home and yearning to return to it -- and actually being in home itself. "I began to interrogate the idea of missing and memories and I fused it with the idea of old shoes and the memories associated with them," she says, elaborating that the installation consisted of 400 disused shoes that people had donated along with notes containing specific memories associated with the shoe. Looking at the installation (below), it is almost as if the threads anchor the memories in form of the shoes in place, lest they vanish into nothingness and being unremembered.

Chiharu Shiota, Dialogue from DNA, (2004) Manggha, Centre of Japanese Art and Technology, Krakow, Poland, Shoes, Thread Photograph: Sunhi Mang

Chiharu has often remarked that working with thread is a bit like drawing in air. “When I began working as a painter, I felt that two-dimensional drawings were limiting me. I needed more space so I started working on installations and using thread in order to achieve a three dimensional drawing, so to speak. The threads since then have been a fundamental aspect of my work,” she says. These threads represent multiple meanings in her diverse output of work, whether of connections or ensnarement or opacity.

Apart from the threads embroidering the surface of Chiharu's installation spaces, they are also home to objects which Chiharu frequently and quite literally weaves into her works; these objects are plucked from the quotidian, facilitating both the unspooling of a narrative while crucially being a narrative in themselves. They also signify absences, absences which become the works' fundamental bedrock. "Specific objects inspire me when I experience a personal association or link with them as I did when putting on my old shoes. Abandoned objects are laden with even more memories and associations," she mentions, suggesting that this surplus of memories adds further narrative texture to her work. "The object itself has a meaning, being a signifier and then my role would be to weave its memories and meaning together using the threads."

Chiharu Shiota, During Sleep, (2004), Saint-Marie-Madeleine, Lille, France, Thread, Beds, Performers
Photographer: Sunhi Mang

While objects frequently figure as the central components of her installation works, her works are also distinctively body-oriented, as evidenced in works such as During Sleep, which features real-life women asleep on hospital beds and the space enshrouded in her customary fog of thread, bringing to forth gendered associations with the fairy-tale Sleeping Beauty.

Paper Art

What happens when a Macy star and a pipe-smoking fish meet:

Rockstar Fish

Having migrated from Japan to Pittsburgh, a lonely pink origami bird finds a friend in a bough which was otherwise restlessly cartwheeling through life :

An Angry Cloud, A Flying Bird and a Tree

Urban Landscapes: Lovers' Lock Bridge and Windowed Message

Constellation of locks

I remember the first time I encountered the lock bridge; it was a rare sunny Sunday in late January and after a filling brunch, we headed to Schenley Park for a walk before the sun went down and the ink-shroud of the winter night would envelop us. En route to the park, we had to cross a bridge - and it was then I noticed locks randomly studding the fence. By the time we reached the middle of the bridge, the fence was densely covered with a huge profusion of locks of all shapes, sizes, and colors. What was most notable about the locks was that they were either inscribed with presumably lovers' initials or single words such as 'mine'.

C+L

I had never seen anything quite like it before - and yet, it seemed entirely organic, having seem to grow of its own accord and evolving over time. Others walked past it without giving as much a second glance, clearly accepting it as part of the urban landscape as much as the neon yellow claws graffitiing the pavement below the locks or the cars whizzing below the bridge. And then, it too slipped out of my mind...

Few days ago, when indulging in my monthly fashion magazine round-up, I glimpsed a familiar sight in the pages of Elle: bridge studded with locks. However, this particular bridge was located in Paris and it was said that lovers 'locked' their love by affixing the locks to the bridge's fence and throwing away the keys in the Seine flowing below, thus symbolising eternal love. What I thought was a curious, isolated phenomenon was in fact - not... and simply googling 'lock bridge' revealed that apart from Paris, such lock-studded bridges are found all over the world, including Rome, Venice, Brooklyn, Seoul, Taiwan, and our very own Pittsburgh.

One of the many lock bridges in Paris

Rome: Ponte Milvio

There are several speculations as to how this tradition developed; some attribute it to the Chinese, who believed in 'locking' souls together. The lock bridge in Rome, for example, owes to the Federico Moccia's Italian novel, I Want You in which lovers affix the locks to Ponte Milvio and throw the keys  into the canal. However, authorities meanwhile see the padlocks being an eye-sore and weighing bridges down, thus necessitating being removed - and as this writer mentions here, the locks symbolise anything but love, love being synonymous with freedom.

For me, though, I perceived it as an urban shrine of sorts of lovers and for lovers; I recalled the wish trees that I had glimpsed in India and commonly appear in various avatars across the world. Here, though, the fence and locks had replaced the branches and ribbons respectively. And yet, the sense of yearning and hope radiated as strongly from the locks as they did from the ribbons.

How people engage with and insert themselves into their surroundings to create such interesting urban narratives fascinates me - and that's why I was drawn towards the lock-bridge. Thinking about it, such whimsical and honestly speaking, adorable examples of street art and installations really brighten up my day...when you are walking through man-made landscapes, you may unconsciously feel that you will not encounter as many surprises and beauties as you may do in natural environments, such as a forest or beach. However, such thinking clearly underestimate the surprises which are embedded inside the urban world - it's all a question of looking.

And so, I will leave you with a thought-provoking surprise I encountered in downtown Pittsburgh a few days ago. Lost and late for an event, I was running helter-skelter through the streets and alternately glancing down at Google maps on my phone to locate the place I was meant to go to. However, I immediately stopped in my tracks when I saw this:

It was pasted on the window of a shop, which looked abandoned and had been for quite a while...save for this sign. Who had left it there and why? Whatever the motivations and reasons behind it, I am sure it must have compelled many passerbys to pause in their frenetic wanderings and simply reflect upon the message and the question the sign enclosed. Or as in my case, take a picture of it as a reminder and remembrance. Like a bottled message, this is a windowed message...

I found it so compelling that I could not help sharing both this picture and question across different social media networks - and I now pose it to you over here.

Where will you be standing?