The Soul Trembles
By Mia Funk
From December 11, 2024, to March 19, 2025, the Grand Palais in Paris presents a major exhibition dedicated to Chiharu Shiota, a Japanese artist celebrated for her stunning thread installations. The exhibition, held in the partially restored Grand Palais, offers visitors a poetic immersion into her unique universe and invites audiences to step into Shiota’s meditative world, where threads weave stories of human connection and the ephemeral nature of life.

Photo credit: Mia Funk

At the reception for the opening of The Soul Trembles, I asked Chiaru Shiota, “What do you think happens after we die? Do you believe in an afterlife?”

She thought a moment and replied, “Yes and no.”

Her response is true to what viewers experience when visiting her installations. The visitor is taken on a journey and immersed in an ephemeral world where they are posed fundamental questions about life and death. The threads you follow are up to you, and each visitor must answer that question for themselves. Where are we going? Are you ready for the journey? What is a soul? What do you believe? Why did you go on this journey? What gives your life meaning?

Born in Osaka in 1972, Shiota began her artistic journey studying painting in Kyoto. Influenced by Marina Abramović, she transitioned to performance and installation art, famously covering herself in red enamel paint in her 1994 work Becoming Painting. Her art, often made with hundreds of kilometers of thread, explores universal themes like memory, connection, and existence.

Shiota's works transform spaces into emotional journeys. Describing her thread art as "drawing in the air," she creates intricate networks that evoke human connections, neural pathways, and interior journeys. Notable works like Uncertain Journey envelop viewers in a web of red threads, reflecting on themes of memory, human bonds, and migration.

Shiota imbues her installations with profound symbolism using black, red, and white: black for introspection, red for life and connection, and white, introduced after her illness in 2017, for rebirth. Everyday objects such as shoes, beds, and suitcases wrapped in thread connect viewers to collective memories, inviting meditation upon important philosophical and spiritual questions.

Shiota’s work is deeply influenced by her experiences with cancer, which lead her to explore fragility, resilience, and transformation. Themes of life, death, and memory recur in ephemeral installations, which exist only for the duration of an exhibition, emphasizing the transient nature of existence.

Beyond installations, Shiota regularly collaborates with opera and theater, exploring themes like love, fate, and mortality.

if i could have i would have cut the music already
A response to Chiharu Shiota's Uncertain Journey
By Henie Zhang

do you see a white face in the windowless sky?

    my skin, where i show up my life

it is a crimpling noise made when light comes through

unctuous blood moon

i become obsessed with the wind in the curtains
its scarlet junk    its soft teeth
i become obsessed with scarlet everything data

i bring it with me every whicheverway
like a motion sensor

your sleep stream is just the size of my hands
& shape though there is a clot

i gesture at the clot for many hours in the bath
    you do not notice
so i remain clothed, an earth mound

you wanted to spit inside the grapefruit i gouged newly

& i’d give everything just to speak

penetrate the city of dirt saints
on the reverse of a sick bag
i grow a red room to push it out endlessly
the red of the flag walking free,
            breaking down, spasmodic
an emergency phoneme, slaughter rag
     i wanted slap it
     if it could hurt,
     i wanted to hurt it

like the pill that crushes against itself in order to sing
a ghost heat transfuses the ceiling with interruption

once
you wanted to look like a map of the pig you ate

& i wanted to move like milky bright ejecta in it

what is a bird that makes a sound like plummet you said

an invitation to do things differently this time

instead of up
we gathered in the same place to worship night shapes
omitted by all color & time

said the dark was a different country entirely

& our eyes, they were the stones there