Ning-Hui Chung

Chiharu Shiota (born 1972, Osaka, Japan) is a Japanese artist known for her immersive installations composed of threads, keys, suitcases, and clothing. Her woven networks symbolize the interconnection of memory and thought, exploring themes of life, absence, and existence. Blending performance and spatial construction, Shiota transforms emotion into tangible space—turning memory into a poetic, walkable experience.

The Key in the Hand (2015), exhibited at the Japan Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, features two wooden boats suspended beneath 50,000 red keys entangled in a vast web of crimson threads. The red yarns evoke veins, memory, and connection, while the keys symbolize access to personal histories. Immersing viewers in a network of emotion and recollection, Shiota transforms individual memories into a shared, collective space of being.

Chiharu Shiota’s The Key in the Hand builds an architecture of memory through threads and objects. Her material framework centers on red yarn, keys, and boats: threads as veins of thought and emotion, keys as portals to personal and collective pasts, and boats as vessels of passage and memory. Through symbolic transformation of everyday materials, Shiota creates an “emotional topology,” materializing the fluidity of remembrance.

Methodologically, she employs a process of weaving and spatial networking, turning space into a living extension of feeling. This resonates with Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, where the home embodies the soul, and with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, in which perception and embodiment activate meaning. In Shiota’s installations, memory is not represented but inhabited—the viewer’s movement completes the emotional architecture.

In my own practice, Shiota inspires me to treat material as emotional language. Her use of fine threads to evoke psychological weight guides my exploration of how miniature spaces can embody internal states. She shows that sculpture can be a web of thought—a structure that breathes, connects, and remembers. Through her methodology, I learn that art can hold memory not as an image, but as a lived spatial sensation.

#Network of Memory #Installation Art #Materiality of Emotion #Threads and Time #Poetics of Existence

Image credit and website:

https://artjouer.wordpress.com/2015/10/27/the-key-in-the-hand-by-chiharu-shiota/

Written on: 24 August 2025