Continuing through July 20, 2026
We enter “Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries” through a liminal space where a video titled “Chronology of Chiharu Shiota” (2024) sets the stage for the exhibition. Although the Japanese-born, Berlin-based Shiota has long since attained international acclaim, “Two Home Countries” is her debut solo show in the Bay Area, and the video offers a helpful introduction. The artist speaks with disarming candor about the existential unease that informs her sculpture, installations, drawings, and performances. Among her inspirations, we learn, is the ancient East Asian belief in “the red string of fate” that links people and communities despite the twists and turns of time, place, and events. This concept underpins her immersive installation “Diary” (2025).
Indeed, “Diary’s” ruddy glow from the doorframe of the first gallery pulls us toward it like insects to a porch light at night. This major work features sinuous interstitial spaces created by Shiota and eleven assistants working with twenty miles of blood-red yarn. We enter a drawing in space that describes a radiant bodily cavity, a fibrous otherworld. Scattered amid the interlaced strands, as if floating, are hundreds of handwritten pages in Japanese, English, and German.
Those in Japanese are photocopied excerpts from the diaries and other personal documents of World War II military personnel. As an American officer serving in 1943, the Japanologist Donald Keene was ordered to translate such diaries. Many of them were bloodstained, all of them were recovered from the bodies of dead Japanese fighters or found floating in the Pacific.
Some pages end with a request in English that the finder return the diary to the soldier’s family. Keene has written that these diarists were the first Japanese people he ever knew intimately, even though all had perished by the time of the diaries’ recovery, revealing their innermost thoughts. As for the documents in English, many are translations of the diary pages. Those in German, acquired by Shiota at Berlin flea markets, are first-person accounts of the hardships Germans faced during the immediate postwar period. “Diary” expands on this convergence of the hearts, drawing us to individuals whose histories and identities may feel foreign yet whose feelings of loss, fear, and vulnerability are universally familiar.
Some artists privilege visual perception. Others unpack the world conceptually. Shiota experiences it bodily. Not as flesh, however, but as the body’s lingering presence in absence. “Diary” relies on written documents, while earlier works involve shoes, keys, and salvaged window frames as vessels of selfhood and memory. Even her performance videos externalize the artist’s consciousness. In “Wall” (2010), for instance, she displaces attention from her nude body to the medical tubing that entwines it with what looks like blood racing through.
Anxieties took on new urgency for Shiota after she was diagnosed with advanced and aggressive ovarian cancer in 2005. Following surgery and chemotherapy, the cancer went into remission, only to reoccur in 2017. Does the spirit endure after the body is gone? If so, how so? The questions still haunt her. As the work in this exhibition attests, Shiota continues to process her confrontations with mortality. Fear has become indispensable to her artmaking.
In “Beyond My Body” (2025), three ragged and vaguely mammary forms, created from slashed sheets of red-stained leather, dangle over a pair of realistic bronze feet. It conjures a radiant night terror about a disintegrating body. Nearby, four small multimedia objects are displayed like expensive jewels. All are titled “Cell” (2024 and 2025). All imagine monstrous cancerous growths.
The piece that most obviously meets the expectations set by the show’s title, “Two Home Countries” (2025), addresses another aspect of Shiota’s unresolvable feelings about where she belongs. A wire and rope drawing in space, it’s anchored by the frames of two widely spaced houses, one representing her native Japan and the other, Germany, where the artist has lived for some thirty years. Sparkling coils of wire pack the houses and crawl up a wall while a dress rises from the floor. A frequent motif in Shiota’s art, the dress denotes a second skin that, unlike natural skin, eludes markers of race and national origin.
Like many of her other works, “Two Home Countries” has a theatrical presence. Among Shiota’s strategies are the use of cast shadows and bold color. Inky black and blood red appear throughout the exhibition. Clearly, she relishes working on a grand scale.
Unsurprisingly, she is also a stage designer. The exhibition concludes with video highlights, drawings, and a reproduction of Shiota’s set for “Kinkakuji” (2025), a theatrical production based on a novel inspired by a real-life act of arson in postwar Kyoto. Staged last fall at New York’s Japan Society, where this exhibition originated, “Kinkakuji” dramatizes the tragedy of a psychologically disturbed Buddhist monk who burned down a 14th century temple that was swathed in gold-leaf. Shiota’s set consists of a curtain of gridded cords swept with shimmering colors and projected lights as the disaster unfolds.
As dazzling as this set is, the emotional swerve to a collaborative project set in Japan and narrated by an actor feels excessive. You may find yourself, as I did, too wrung out by the works wrenched from Shiota’s experiences to engage fully with “Kinkakuji.” The exhibition’s soul resides in the art sparked by “the red string of fate,” bringing about afflictions yet also holding life together.
