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Straits Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
Explore the idea of home with 160km of red cord in artist Chiharu Shiota's Boston show
Berlin-based Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota's new exhibition, Home Less Home, at ICA Watershed is her largest museum show in the United States. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES Explore the idea of home with 160km of red cord in artist Chiharu Shiota's Boston show BOSTON – Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota has drawn a simple shape in thin air and at monumental scale: a rectangle with a pitched roof, instantly recognisable as the universal symbol of home. This ethereal installation is made of polyester cord – some 21,000 lengths of it, streaming down 7m from the ceiling of the ICA Watershed, a massive exhibition space at an active shipyard in east Boston. A rectangular forest of blood-red cords hangs nearly to the floor of this former factory space. Inside, the cords shift to lengths of black that form a dark silhouette of a house. Visible within this mirage-like structure are antique furnishings – a four-poster bed, rocking chair, dinette set, sewing table and chair – with a spectacular flock of paper of some 6,000 sheets fluttering above the domestic tableau. Shiota's new commission, titled Home Less Home, opened on May 22 under the banner of the inaugural citywide Boston Public Art Triennial and will remain till Sept 1. Artist Chiharu Shiota's Home Less Home exhibition at ICA Watershed. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES 'The house shape looks like a shadow because home does not exist,' Shiota said in a recent interview at the Watershed as she reached among the cords to affix the final pieces of paper with a stapler. 'Home is like something in your heart, inside,' added the soft-spoken artist, 53, who grew up in Osaka, Japan, and has lived and worked in Berlin since 1997. Her immigrant story, both personal and age-old, echoes those of many residents living in east Boston near the shipyard, once the second-largest point of immigration in the United States, after Ellis Island. Earlier this spring, the ICA distributed a flier asking the local community to consider Shiota's open-ended questions of 'what home means, what it feels like to leave home and what it takes to rebuild it'. The Home Less Home exhibition includes the personal stories, photographs, drawings and documents of members of the local community in Boston. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES Their personal stories, photographs, drawings and documents were reproduced on the sheets of white paper animating her installation. For almost three decades, the artist has created haunting, visceral environments using vast webs and fields of her signature cords – she calls them 'threads' – entwined with accumulations of well-worn objects, such as shoes or beds, that evoke both human presence and absence. At the Venice Biennale in Italy in 2015, Shiota transformed the Japanese Pavilion with an atmospheric matrix of red thread embedded with thousands of collected keys raining down into wooden row boats – objects poetically summoning ideas of entry, exit, passage and afterlife. A mid-career retrospective that opened at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in 2019, The Soul Trembles, has toured places such as Busan, South Korea; Shanghai and Shenzhen, China ; Jakarta, Indonesia; Brisbane, Australia; and most recently Paris – with an accompanying monograph published this spring by Skira. The show travels next to Italy and Canada. Mori Art Museum director Mami Kataoka, who organised the retrospective, said via e-mail that she has been astonished by visitor numbers worldwide that have far exceeded each institution's expectations. 'Beyond cultural differences, this response underscores the universality of the themes in Chiharu's work,' Ms Kataoka wrote, including 'our shared fear about an uncertain future and our common quest to understand the meaning of life and what may lie beyond it'. Artist Chiharu Shiota often uses networks of wool thread, a medium she feels better conjures the intangible tangles of emotions and invisible connections among people. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES Shiota left her home in Japan with just one suitcase to study abroad, eventually finding her way to Berlin. She trained as an abstract painter, but early on shifted to 'painting in the air' – as she called it – using networks of wool thread, a medium she felt better conjured the intangible tangles of emotions and invisible connections among people. 'Many times, I'm using red string, the colour of blood,' she said, symbolic of 'family, nation, religion and survival'. In Berlin, a city she found weighted with history and inspiring to her artwork, Shiota met her husband and raised their daughter, who is now 18. 'Now, I have the feeling I have two home countries,' said the artist, who often collects discarded suitcases and other commonplace items at Berlin flea markets for her installations. Pieces of vintage leather luggage are part of the exhibition, Home Less Home. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES For the exhibition at the ICA Watershed, Shiota's largest museum show in the US, she has also adapted her 2014 piece, Accumulation – Searching For The Destination, near the entrance as part of her reflection on home. Thirty pieces of vintage leather luggage dangling inside another shower of red threads lead viewers into the show. Some of the suitcases have an internal motor, making them bob as if adrift at sea. 'Each person, one suitcase – they're ready to go, but we don't know where,' said Shiota, who will have solo shows in New York at the Japan Society and Templon gallery later in 2025. Ms Ruth Erickson, chief curator at the ICA, said: 'Chiharu is incredible at picking these objects that feel like they have this lifetime of wear and use and memory in them, that can be a kind of surrogate for a human story.' She invited Shiota to make the site-specific installation for the cavernous Watershed space, calling her 'an artist who understands how to work at a scale that can be a real challenge'. Home Less Home comprises around 160km of cord. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES Home Less Home comprises around 160km of cord . Walking the processional length of the installation, a visitor experiences it perceptually dissolving into singular threads up close, while in longer views, it coalesces into a majestic volume. Shiota has created a winding pathway through the heart of her project, and viewers can see at close range what is printed on the fluttering sheets of paper. There are photographs of airport reunions, children playing on lawns, a Venezuelan's first experience of snow in Boston. One person offered a recipe for apple dumplings. A child's drawing of a house includes the handwritten line: 'Home is all the important people who makes the life better.' A woman contributed her falsified adoption papers deeming her an orphan, with the accompanying message: 'May all Korean adoptees find their way back home.' Personal photographs of community members are part of the exhibition. PHOTO: PHILIP KEITH/NYTIMES While none of Shiota's work is overtly political, 'this idea of where one makes one's home, and what the connections are to a place, could never be more at the forefront of our minds', Ms Erickson said. 'We see a country and an administration really analysing those rights.' Against the backdrop of court cases and debates raging in the news cycle about the fate of immigrants, who often are portrayed as a faceless monolith, the testimonies in Home Less Home are acute in their individuality. Sifting through these collected stories, they touched Shiota like a chorus of voices. 'I never met this person,' she said, 'but I feel like I know this person.' NYTIMES Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
New York Times
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Building a Home From 100 Miles of Cord
The artist Chiharu Shiota has drawn a simple shape in thin air and at monumental scale — a rectangle with a pitched roof, instantly recognizable as the universal symbol of home. This ethereal installation is made of polyester cord — some 21,000 lengths of it, streaming down 23 feet from the ceiling of the ICA Watershed, a massive exhibition space at an active shipyard in East Boston. A rectangular forest of blood-red cords hangs nearly to the floor of this former factory space. Inside, the cords shift to lengths of black that form a dark silhouette of a house. Visible within this mirage-like structure are antique furnishings — a four-poster bed, rocking chair, dinette set, sewing table and chair — with a spectacular flock of paper, some 6,000 sheets, fluttering above the domestic tableau. Shiota's new commission, titled 'Home Less Home,' opened Thursday under the banner of the inaugural citywide Boston Public Art Triennial and will remain on view through Sept. 1. 'The house shape looks like a shadow because home does not exist,' Shiota said in a recent interview at the Watershed, as she reached among the cords to affix the final pieces of paper with a stapler. 'Home is like something in your heart, inside,' added the soft-spoken artist, 53, who grew up in Osaka and has lived and worked in Berlin since 1997. Shiota's immigrant story, both personal and age-old, echoes those of many residents living in East Boston near the shipyard, once the second largest point of immigration in the United States after Ellis Island. Earlier this spring the ICA distributed a flier asking the local community to consider Shiota's open-ended questions of 'what home means, what it feels like to leave home and what it takes to rebuild it.' Their personal stories, photographs, drawings and documents were reproduced on the sheets of white paper animating her installation. For almost three decades, the artist has created haunting, visceral environments using vast webs and fields of her signature cords — she calls them 'threads' — entwined with accumulations of well-worn objects, like shoes or beds that evoke both human presence and absence. At the Venice Biennale in 2015, Shiota transformed the Japanese Pavilion with an atmospheric matrix of red thread embedded with thousands of collected keys raining down into wooden rowboats — objects poetically summoning ideas of entry, exit, passage, afterlife. A midcareer retrospective that opened in 2019 at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, 'The Soul Trembles,' has toured Busan, South Korea; Shanghai and Shenzhen, China; Taipei, Taiwan; Jakarta, Indonesia; Brisbane, Australia; and most recently Paris — with an accompanying monograph published this spring by Skira (the show travels next to Italy and Canada). Mami Kataoka, the director of Mori Art Museum who organized the retrospective, said by email that she has been astonished by visitor numbers worldwide that have far exceeded each institution's expectations. 'Beyond cultural differences, this response underscores the universality of the themes in Chiharu's work,' Kataoka wrote, including 'our shared fear about an uncertain future and our common quest to understand the meaning of life and what may lie beyond it.' Shiota left her own home in Japan with just one suitcase to study abroad, eventually finding her way to Berlin. She trained as an abstract painter but early on shifted to 'painting in the air,' she called it, using networks of wool thread, a medium she felt better conjured the intangible tangles of emotions and invisible connections among people. 'Many times I'm using red string, the color of blood,' she said, symbolic of 'family, nation, religion, survival.' In Berlin, a city she found weighted with history, and inspiring to her artwork, Shiota met her husband and raised their daughter, who is 18. 'Now I have the feeling I have two home countries,' said the artist, who often collects discarded suitcases and other commonplace items at Berlin flea markets for her installations. For the ICA Watershed, Shiota's largest museum show in the U.S., she has also adapted her 2014 piece 'Accumulation — Searching for the Destination' near the entrance as part of her reflection on home. Thirty pieces of vintage leather luggage, dangling inside another shower of red threads, lead viewers into the show. Some of the suitcases are packed with an internal motor, making them bob as though adrift at sea. 'Each person, one suitcase — they're ready to go but we don't know where,' said Shiota, who will have solo shows in New York this fall at the Japan Society and Templon gallery. 'Chiharu is incredible at picking these objects that feel like they have this lifetime of wear and use and memory in them, that can be a kind of surrogate for a human story,' said Ruth Erickson, the chief curator at the ICA. She invited Shiota to make the site-specific installation for the cavernous Watershed space, calling her 'an artist who understands how to work at a scale that can be a real challenge.' 'Home Less Home' comprises around 100 miles of cord, roughly the distance from the Watershed to Cape Cod. Walking the processional length of the installation, a visitor experiences it perceptually dissolving into singular threads up close, while in longer views, it coalesces into a majestic volume. Shiota has created a winding pathway through the heart of her project, and viewers can see at close range what's printed on the fluttering sheets of paper. There are photographs of airport reunions, children playing on front lawns, a Venezuelan's first experience of snow in Boston. One person offered a recipe for apple dumplings. A child's drawing of a house includes the handwritten line, 'Home is all the important people who makes the life better.' A woman contributed her own falsified adoption papers deeming her an orphan, with the accompanying message: 'May all Korean adoptees find their way back home.' While none of Shiota's work is overtly political, 'this idea of where one makes one's home and what the connections are to a place could never be more at the forefront of our minds,' Erickson said. 'We see a country and an administration really analyzing those rights.' Against the backdrop of court cases and debates raging in the news cycle about the fate of immigrants, who so often are portrayed as a faceless monolith, the testimonies in 'Home Less Home' are acute in their individuality. Sifting through these collected stories, they touched Shiota like a chorus of voices. 'I never met this person,' she said, 'but I feel like I know this person.'
Boston Globe
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Notions of home and windblown rootlessness tumble together at ICA's Watershed
Advertisement Two distinct works fill the cavernous concrete space, but their material and thematic echoes tie them tightly together, if you'll pardon the pun. Amid the forests of rope that give her exhibition structure, instability, loose and dreamlike, pervades; given her subject, precarity is simple fact. Chiharu Shiota, "Accumulation — Searching for the Destination," 2014/2025. Installation view, at the ICA Watershed in East Boston. Timothy Schenck In the first piece that greets you at the door, a dozen or more weatherbeaten suitcases dangle suspended within the red rope, arcing up and away in a gesture that suggests liftoff, blown by the wind to parts unknown. (A handful are motorized and twitch at the end of their tethers, as though anxious in their uprootedness.) The evocation, of lives unmoored and left to scatter, feels inevitable. Advertisement In this era of mass migration prompted by war, poverty, or any number of climate disasters, it's hard not to project a sense of the ominous on Shiota's scene. The movement of people across oceans and borders, by choice or not, has never felt more fraught, nor been more apparent. 'Home Less Home,' though planned years ago as the Watershed's 2025 summer feature, lands in Boston amid a perilous moment for the American experiment. The city has become a favorite target of the new presidential administration's Chiharu Shiota's "Home Less Home," 2025. Timothy Schenck The intentions of 'Home Less Home,' were surely not so pointed — it was commissioned years ago, in the before times — but reality has a way of intruding all the same. The suitcases are the core of 'Accumulation — Searching for the Destination,' a 2014 piece reinvented here as a kind of introductory text for Shiota's milieu. Years ago at a Berlin flea market, Shiota found an old suitcase packed with family photos and personal notes. Absence became presence as Shiota meditated on the lives contained within; the artist felt a connection, having relocated from Japan to Berlin in 1996 as a young artist looking to find her feet. Berlin, a thriving cosmopolitan creative crossroads, became home, a personal happy ending; her career arc took her in 2015 to the Venice Biennale, the pinnacle of the art world, as Japan's official representative. But in the piece itself, the in-between space is left to your imagination, a satisfying prompt for an active mind, if not — at least in my case — a uniquely uplifting one. Advertisement Chiharu Shiota, "Home Less Home" (detail), 2025, at the ICA Watershed. Timothy Schenck The second piece in the exhibition, the titular 'Home Less Home,' 2025, commissioned specifically for the Watershed, feels tilted more clearly toward hope. Deeper into the Watershed, the space broadens, and Shiota opens a portal in the haze to let you inside. In 'Home Less Home,' Shiota clears a path that winds, fittingly, through its stand of rope, which has shifted here; red limns the contours of the exterior, while black frames a distinct space inside. Along the journey are familiar objects: a bed, a dresser, a table and chairs — markers of home, a place to lay your head. Alongside the domestic, Shiota conjures the uncanny: clusters of ephemera — notes, photographs, sketches — that hang suspended above as though trapped in a suddenly flash-frozen typhoon. Chiharu Shiota, "Accumulation — Searching for the Destination," 2014/2025, at the ICA Watershed. Timothy Schenck Each one ties the piece to the immediate here and now; Shiota crowdsourced stories of immigrant experience from neighborhood organizations including the Donald McKay K-8 School, East Boston High School, the East Boston Neighborhood Health Center, the East Boston Social Centers, and Eastie Farm, just to name a few. Her prompts were simple: 'What does home mean, what does it feel like to leave home, and what does it take to rebuild it?,' she asked. From children's pencil-scratched essays and drawings to old family photos to expired passports and visas, the outpouring of hundreds of documents strike a distinctly human chord. The space, ghostly and evocative, becomes populated and very real. Advertisement It should feel heartwarming, a repository of the triumphant struggle to find home and take root. But the upheaval of the piece — so much up in the air, blown by the wind — led me to darker meaning. In the real world just outside the door, roots are being torn up, and lives cut adrift — a world of home more lost than found. Out there in the real world, there's no sense of how — or if — they can all truly come to rest. CHIHARU SHIOTA: HOME LESS HOME May 22-Sept. 1. ICA Watershed, 256 Marginal St., East Boston. 617-478-3100, Murray Whyte can be reached at
