between the intimate and the monumental, the Art of the common thread at the Grand Palais

Chiharu Shiota is a woman of few words. Concentrated woman more than secretive woman. Small fluted voice, but thoughtful, very composed, unvarnished face, almost hidden behind her large round glasses, she appears on the screen, as wise as an image that time only intercepts and pauses very temporarily. She is in Korea that day, after China. For twenty-eight years she has lived and worked in Berlin. Driven by success, she continues to travel the world throughout her exhibitions. From PS1 Contemporary Art Center (2003) to K21 Kunstsammlung NRW in Düsseldorf (2014). From the 56^e Venice Biennale in 2015, where she made the Japanese pavilion vibrate with red, at Manifesta 14 Prishtina, the traveling biennial which stopped in Kosovo in 2022, where she gave substance to the relationships between beings and genders through her whirlwind of threads and paper in the secret of the Grand Hammam.

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Thread. The word is there, that of narration and that of spectacle. His monumental installations weave monochrome clouds, blood red or smoke black, in which the imprisoned objects – departure boats, forest of keys, luggage, letters given by others, shiny piano, child’s chair, long white fairy dresses – tell the story an immortal story, that of memory, of experience, of illness, of vulnerability, of nostalgia or desire. A universal story that has run since the dawn of time, from birth to death, from red like the bloody umbilical cord, which marks arrival on earth, to the black of the afterlife and ghosts. These installations are like 3D drawings that place her halfway between sculpture and performance. See her at work, with her stapler which composes her drawing in space at full speed like Shelob, the giant spider of Lord of the Rings by Tolkien, is truly mind-blowing.

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THE MONUMENTAL AND THE INTIMATE

Chiharu Shiota will be the first artist to take possession of the renovated Grand Palais, from December 11, 2024 to March 19, 2025, a sort of operatic preamble to the reopening of all of its galleries in June 2025. Her exhibition will be called «The Soul Trembles» (The thrills of the soul) and will feature seven large-scale installations covering more than 1200 square meters.

But also sculptures, photographs, drawings, performance videos and archive documents linked to his staging project, which will retrace an intense career of more than twenty years, and will present to the general public this emulator of Christian Boltanski, Annette Messager and William Kentridge. Chiharu Shiota, 52, has acquired over time an exponential love rating (she has participated in more than 300 exhibitions, from 1993 to 2021), supported for fifteen years by her Parisian gallery owner, Daniel Templon, and attested by this historical exhibition, co-organized by the GrandPalaisRmn and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. Its director, Mami Kataoka, is the curator of the Parisian event.

How to reconcile the monumental and the intimate? “I love the Grand Palais, it’s so beautiful! This is what everyone who came for the Olympic Games in Paris this summer noticed. I came to see the places, but I couldn’t get tickets for the competitions. And anyway, I had a lot to do. I worked. I like to play with differences in scale and with the soul of places. I like to escape the logic of the “white cube” and make people feel what a place says”tells us, in hesitant English, this defector who speaks German and is married to a Korean she met in Berlin. What meaning does she give to the common thread, so present in her work? “It’s the connection with destiny, but also the color of blood. It’s all in blood, nationality, family, religion, she sums up today. In Japan, it is customary to receive the umbilical cord in a small box when the child is born. My mother has the one that connected us and the one that connected her to her own mother (…) Normally, blood is hidden in the body. In my first performances and videos I showed it outside”she explained to Andrea Jahn in her little red book, An interview with Chiharu Shiota (Kerber, 2016).

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THE WOMAN ARTIST COMPLEX

It is also the color of the Japanese flag, with its large red disc in the center representing the sun, more precisely the Shinto sun goddess Amaterasu. She recognizes him. What remains of Japan in this international artist? “When I’m in Germany, I miss Japan. When I’m in Japan, I miss Germany. I feel like I have two home countriesshe said bluntly. I love Berlin because it is the city of artists. I feel free there. In Japan, people still ask me what my real job is, it’s hard to take an artist seriously, it’s still a hobby. I came to Europe in 1996, after discovering the work of the Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930-2017). I met her in Japan during her exhibition in 1991 at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art. She was a strong woman, despite her age. I was then the assistant of an artist, Muraoka Saburo (1928-2013), and she received me with kindness”remembers the one who then studied with the queen of performance, the Serbian Marina Abramovic in Braunschweig, then with the butterfly woman, Rebecca Horn, in Berlin.

Two temperaments of fire and steel. “Two powerful women who got rid of my complex of being a woman artist in a society of men. Before meeting them, I was happy when people said that my work was that of a man. Thanks to them, guided by their model, this feeling has disappeared”confesses the one who has everything of a strong woman in her turn. “Marina took me and her students to a castle in France for an internship, which was to practice fasting for a week and learn to remain silent. We learn to identify what is important. This material detachment reminded me of the life of monks in Japan. Rebecca Horn wasn’t teaching us how to do Rebecca Horn. She left us free. I loved her works and her films in which she inserted objects she had created. I don’t make films, but my installations can integrate photos among other objects. I like Hirokazu Kore-eda films and Japanese animated films. I saw and really liked the last two films by Wim Wenders, Anselmon the painter Anselm Kiefer, and Perfect Days, about the man who works maintaining public toilets in Tokyo.”

“The common thread is the connection with destiny, but also the color of blood. It’s all in the blood…”

Does she like the long time required for her entirely artisanal installations (three weeks of assembly for the Grand Palais)? “Yes. How I love it when the public is stunned by the finished work. That he cannot explain this feeling right away, that he must take time to understand its meaning.says the one who spends days in silence in her montages, a kind of silent performance in itself.

“Chiharu Shiota, The Soul Trembles”, at the Grand Palais, from December 11, 2024 to March 19, 2025.

To read: “Shiota Chiharu, The Soul Trembles”, bilingual Japanese/English catalog of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2021. And “Chiharu Shiota, Unter der Haut” (Under the skin), Hatje Cantz, 2017