Two Home Countries is the first solo museum exhibition in the Bay Area by Chiharu Shiota, best known for large-scale installations that fill spaces with densely woven webs of colored fibers. Featuring works from throughout Shiota’s career spanning installation, sculpture, video, drawing, and stage design, the exhibition offers a timely meditation on belonging, impermanence, and living with “in-betweenness.”
In the monumental installation Diary, the Osaka-born, Berlin-based artist explores themes of nationality, identity, and memory through her distinctive visual language, reflecting on her own experiences of her “two home countries.” Strands of red yarn stretch across the 88-foot length of the Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang Pavilion, creating a spectacular structure that surrounds audiences as they pass through; overhead, handwritten pages from the journals of Japanese soldiers and postwar German civilians hang suspended in the dreamlike web.
“Shiota is interested in what remains after a person is gone,” says Dr. Robert Mintz, Chief Curator at the Asian Art Museum. “In Diary, the voices of individuals who never met are brought into conversation. The installation makes history feel personal, fragmented, and profoundly present.”
As Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries unfolds, audiences accompany the artist on a journey that is both deeply personal and universally relatable. Navigating an existence suspended between Japan and Germany, absence and presence, isolation and belonging, Shiota explores the threads of memory, history, and identity that make up the complex fabric of our shared reality. Show more . . .
Two Home Countries, the installation from which the show derives its title, evokes what Shiota calls the “in-between sensation” of bicultural identity: a red dress unravels into a sea of cascading red cords, stretching to fill the metal frames of two houses while restlessly climbing the gallery wall.
Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries also features sketches, concept drawings, and video highlights offering a behind-the-scenes look at Shiota’s work as a stage designer for KINKAKUJI (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion), a theatrical production commissioned by the Japan Society in New York.
Later sections of the exhibition feature sculptures, performance videos, and works on paper in which the artist confronts her own body as a home that offers neither comfort nor belonging. As she questions the body’s place in the universe, Shiota finds unexpected beauty in its vulnerable depths.
“Chiharu Shiota’s work resonates because it makes emotional states visible,” says Soyoung Lee, The Barbara Bass Bakar Director and CEO of the Asian Art Museum. “Her installations speak to the experience of living between places, histories, and identities — an experience that feels increasingly familiar to many people today.” Show less
Special Exhibition Ticket Required.
