Art by Chiharu Shiota

Shiota builds room-filling installations out of thread, usually red or black, wound into dense webs around found objects: keys, shoes, beds, suitcases, small boats. She studied under both Marina Abramović and sculptor Rebecca Horn, and her own work carries something of both, the endurance of performance and the psychological charge of Horn's objects. Representing Japan at the 2015 Venice Biennale, she suspended tens of thousands of keys, collected from the public, over two wooden boats in a piece called The Key in the Hand. Her own cancer diagnosis and treatment fed directly into later work like Dialogue with Absence, and a major touring retrospective, "The Soul Trembles," has moved through Paris, London, and, in 2026, Montreal.