The Soul Trembles

In collaboration with Japan’s Mori Art Museum (2021), the Taipei Fine Arts Museum has had the distinct honor of presenting Shiota Chiharu: The Soul Trembles, thus affording local audiences the opportunity to experience the artist’s immersive installations firsthand. Curated by Mori Art Museum Director, Kataoka Mami, the exhibition examines and highlights important turning points in the artist's career by presenting sculpture, video and photo documentation of performance artworks, drawings, stage design, and related drawings and documents. A number of powerful, large-scale installations anchor the exhibition of more than one hundred works, enabling audiences to fully appreciate the artist's twenty-five-year creative journey. Shiota's early works started from her desire to acknowledge life and death, and from this, she extended her works to metaphors that relate to existence and identity, and countless boundaries both personal and universal. Instead of words, she often relies on objects such as beds, window frames, shoes, and suitcases to convey a connection between the object and an imagined owner, thus offering a glimpse of the owner in a story suggested by the object. Shiota regularly uses red, black, and white thread to enclose objects and create elaborate webs in space. The threads represent the complexity of relationships in our human world, and even the complex connections between personal universes and the power of the greater universe. By inviting audience members to walk through these dense networks, Shiota calls forth their intricate memories, as well as hopes her work will remain with them. Through these countless connections, she establishes more relationships with people and the world. Shiota has said, “Every space is new for me because every space is different. It is the same material but created in a different atmosphere, therefore this installation can only exist there.”