(born 1972) is a Japanese performance and installation artist. Educated in Japan, Australia, and Germany, Shiota interweaves materiality and the psychic perception of the space to explore ideas around the body and flesh, personal narratives that engage with memory, territory, and alienation. Her signature installations, which consist of dazzling, intricate networks of threads stretching across gallery rooms, made the artist rise to fame in the 2000s. Shiota has exhibited worldwide and represented Japan in the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.
Early life, education and teaching
Shiota was born in Osaka. Her parents ran a business manufacturing fish boxes, producing a thousand wooden boxes a day. She wanted to be an artist since she was twelve. Although her parents didn't directly support her desire to be an artist and worried about her, she was able to formally study art. She studied at the Kyoto Seika University in Kyoto from 1992 to 1996, was an exchange student at Canberra School of Art, Australian National University, 1993-93 and a student at Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Braunschweig, from 1997 to 1999 and at Universität der Künste, Berlin, from 1999 to 2003. In an interview with Andrea Jahn, Shiota mentions that her first installation work was Becoming Painting, which was created with red enamel paint she used on her body. "Taking part in Becoming Painting was indeed an act of liberation. It was my first physical piece of work, using my whole body, rather than a skillful artwork." In Berlin, she was a student of Rebecca Horn and in Braunschweig studied with Marina Abramović.
Work
Shiota's oeuvre links various aspects of art performances, sculpture and installation practices. Mostly renowned for her vast, room-spanning webs of threads or hoses, she links abstract networks with concrete everyday objects such as keys, window frames, dresses, shoes, boats and suitcases. Her early works are performance pieces, many of which were recorded in photographs and video, in which, for example, she uses mud, while later large-scale installations integrate personal objects (e.g. shoes) given to her by other people. Materials and colors carry particular meanings in her artistic work, in which menstruation blood is used as artistic material and red threads come to signify human relationships. Shiota acknowledges her teacher Marina Abramovic's influence during her formative years and refers to Christian Boltanski's work as a source of inspiration for some of her later installation works. Places matter to her work and she is strongly interested in psychogeography, the relationship between psyche and space. Shiota's thread installation works developed from the artist's experience of moving between places out of which evolved the desire to cover her possessions in yarn thereby marking a personal territory. In an interview she states that she could not have made her large-scale installations, A Room of Memory (2009) and Memory of Skin (2005), without living in Berlin. She has also created work in collaboration with choreographers and composers such as Toshio Hosokawa, Sasha Waltz and Stefan Goldmann.