Chiharu Shiota: Red String, Black Threads and Cultural Identity

Why It Matters

Shiota’s blend of personal trauma and cross‑cultural myth offers a powerful lens on identity, making the exhibition a touchstone for artists and institutions navigating globalization.

Key Takeaways

• Shiota’s installations use red strings to map human connections
• Drawings collaborate with Yoko Tawada, exploring cultural translation
• Dresses act as second skins, embodying personal identity
• "Threats of Life" visualizes mythic pinky‑string destiny and interpersonal bonds
• Performance video "War" merges bodily violence with prenatal intimacy

Summary

The new major exhibition of Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota, staged in Berlin, foregrounds her signature use of red string and black thread to explore cultural identity, translation, and the invisible ties that bind people.

The show assembles more than 460 collaborative drawings with writer Yoko Tawada, a daily‑column illustration project that maps Shiota’s experience as a trainee in Germany. Sculptural pieces such as “State of Being Dress” treat garments as second skins, while the installation “Threats of Life” translates an old Japanese myth of pinky‑string destiny into a labyrinth of keys and cords. A video‑performance titled “War” captures red‑liquid tubes winding around the artist’s body, echoing both violence and prenatal intimacy.

Curators note the palpable presence of Shiota’s hands throughout the gallery, describing the work as “intimate” and “heavy with emotion.” A heartbeat recording in “War” evokes a womb‑like sound, prompting one viewer to liken it to the first pulse of a newborn. The red strings, described as “visualizations of relationships,” constantly pull and weight the objects, reinforcing the theme of connection.

By marrying personal narrative with universal myth, Shiota’s exhibition challenges viewers to confront the fragility of identity in a globalized world, positioning her practice at the intersection of contemporary art, performance, and cultural discourse.

Original Description

Take a short video tour of the Hayward Gallery exhibition, Chiharu Shiota: Threads of Life in the company of Senior Curator Yung Ma and Southbank Centre Associate Artist Julia Cheng.

Chiharu Shiota is an artist best known for her large-scale thread installations, but as Ma explains, this Hayward Gallery exhibition – Shiota’s first solo show at a London public institution – covers all aspects of the artist’s practice.

Ma and Cheng’s video tour begins with a series of 460 drawings by Shiota for the newspaper serialisation of Yoko Tawada’s ‘Praktikantin (The Trainee)’, a work which explores the notion of cultural identity and the challenges of translation.

The pair move on to look at two of Shiota’s thread works. The first is ’State of Being (Dress)’, 2025, which encapsulates Shiota’s concept of clothes serving as a second skin. The other is the ‘epic’ ‘Threads of Life’, from which the exhibition takes its name, a sprawling installation with thousands of keys suspended in red thread – a visualisation of the relationships between people and objects.

The tour concludes with a look at ‘Wall’, 2010, a personal and intimate video piece in which the artist lies naked on the floor of a clinically-lit room entwined in thin tubes.

Chiharu Shiota: Threads of Life is at the Hayward Gallery until Sunday 3 May, 2026.

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