In San Francisco, within the galleries of the Asian Art Museum, Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota once again weaves her immense webs of red thread, transforming the museum into a space that is at once mental, emotional, and almost spiritual. On view through July 20, Two Home Countries—the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the Bay Area—is more than a retrospective. It is an exploration of identity, memory, and what Shiota describes as “in-betweenness”: the experience of existing between two worlds.
Born in Osaka in 1972 and based in Berlin for many years, Shiota has built her artistic practice around a sense of belonging that remains incomplete, never entirely resolved. Japan represents her origins, cultural memory, and the emotional landscape of childhood; Germany, by contrast, is the place of artistic transformation, independence, and creative maturity. Two countries, but also two identities that coexist without ever fully merging. It is from this tension between overlapping forms of belonging that the emotional force of her work emerges.
To enter a Shiota installation is to enter a physical manifestation of thought. Her signature networks of thread—red, black, or white—do not simply occupy a space; they transform it, making it feel almost alive and breathing. The thread can be read as memory, connection, bloodline, or fate. Every knot seems to hold an invisible story, while every woven structure suggests relationships between people, places, and moments in time.
In Diary, the monumental installation at the heart of the San Francisco exhibition, this poetic language reaches an almost architectural scale. Red threads stretch across the entire Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang Pavilion for more than twenty-six meters, enveloping visitors within an immersive, labyrinthine environment. Suspended overhead are handwritten pages drawn from the diaries of Japanese soldiers and postwar German civilians, creating an impossible dialogue between distant lives—people who never met, yet shared experiences of loss, survival, and disorientation.
The work transforms collective history into something deeply intimate. Shiota does not present historical events in a didactic manner; instead, she fragments them, infuses them with emotion, and relocates them into the realm of personal memory. This approach is also rooted in her own biography. Moving to Germany in the 1990s confronted her with a profound sense of displacement. In numerous interviews, the artist has spoken about never feeling completely “at home” in either Japan or Europe. That state of suspended identity became the very center of her artistic practice.
The exhibition title itself, Two Home Countries, contains an apparent contradiction: having two homes may also mean never fully belonging to either one. In one of the exhibition’s most significant works of the same name, a red dress dissolves into a sea of thread that spreads across two house-like structures and extends outward onto the gallery walls. The dress—an implied but absent human presence—is one of Shiota’s recurring motifs. Empty garments, worn shoes, beds, and suitcases become traces of lives once lived, relics of identities that remain unseen.
Absence is, in fact, one of the central themes of Shiota’s work. She appears most interested in what remains after a person has gone. Not the portrait of the individual, but their emotional imprint. In this sense, her art engages with the collective memory of trauma—war, migration, and loss—but also with profoundly contemporary experiences such as cultural displacement and the challenge of defining oneself in an increasingly mobile and fragmented world.
This reflection feels especially relevant today, when millions of people live between languages, cultures, and geographies. Shiota’s installations give visual form to something deeply human yet difficult to represent: the feeling of being simultaneously connected and isolated.
The San Francisco exhibition also enters into an intriguing dialogue with The Soul Trembles, on view through June at Turin’s Museum of Oriental Art (MAO). There, too, the exhibition explores the major themes of Shiota’s practice—memory, death, identity, and invisible relationships—but from a broader, almost retrospective perspective. While The Soul Trembles focuses on the universal dimensions of emotion and human vulnerability, Two Home Countries feels more autobiographical, more directly connected to the artist’s personal experience of living between East and West.
Yet the two exhibitions complement one another. In Turin, the existential dimension of Shiota’s work comes to the forefront: the fragile body, the passage of time, and the gradual erosion of memory. In San Francisco, that same tension becomes a reflection on cultural identity and the idea of home. In both exhibitions, however, one constant remains: the artist’s remarkable ability to transform the simplest materials—especially thread—into deeply immersive emotional experiences.
There is also an almost ritualistic quality to her practice. Her installations require weeks of manual construction and often involve teams of assistants weaving thousands of meters of thread. The repetitive act of weaving becomes part of the artwork itself, as though each knot were a meditation on time, memory, and the invisible connections that bind people together.
Perhaps this is what makes Chiharu Shiota’s work so compelling: her ability to make visible what usually remains unseen. Her threads do not simply represent relationships; they embody them. They become thoughts, memories, wounds, and forms of belonging. They are an attempt to give shape to everything we cannot hold onto.
In a historical moment marked by migration, hybrid identities, and constant cultural crossings, Two Home Countries is not merely about the life of Chiharu Shiota. It speaks to an increasingly shared condition: the experience of feeling, at once, connected to multiple places and not entirely at home in any of them.
In a contemporary art world often dominated by immediacy, Shiota creates spaces that demand time, attention, and presence. Her works are not simply viewed; they are inhabited, experienced, and carried away long after the encounter ends. Perhaps that is why following her work—from San Francisco to Turin and through museums and biennials around the world—offers such a rare artistic experience: one capable of speaking quietly to something profoundly human.
To learn more about the artist and follow her international exhibitions, visitors can explore Chiharu Shiota official website.
Mariantonia Cambareri
AsianArtMuseum
San Francisco, CA
EXHIBITION: Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries
3 aprile 2026 – 20 luglio 2026
Padiglione Akiko Yamazaki e Jerry Yang