Another Planet: Chiharu Shiota Solo Exhibition

In Art, dreams become concrete, creating these large-scale installations allows me to create worlds within worlds, where the viewer can experience a manifestation of human consciousness. Stepping into the unknown takes courage and hope, often exploring something that can feel absurd. It is a magical aspect of life, to create something new and fantastical. Especially children, have this sense of wonder and mystery in their life. Their sense of imagination is still true. In their play they create worlds with wonder an awe. I am curious to explore the minds of children, to explore how they create these worlds and rules and how they understand the world. For the installation “What do you wish for?”, I want children to reveal the wishes they have in life. This can mean anything that is important to them, from toys to candy but also perhaps places they would like to see or moments they want to experience.
Art has the power to transform an individual consciousness, it is its real meaning. I often think about the Taoist text “The Butterfly Dream” by Zhuang Zhou. Within the text, a man dreamt he was a butterfly, but when he awoke from this dream, he could not say if he is a man who dreamt of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being a man. His sense of reality blends, he cannot say definitely where his consciousness lays. I feel that the window acts in the same way. It is an opening in space, but are we inside looking out or on the outside looking in? It seems like the two spaces can mix and I can’t distinguish whether I am inside or outside. This reflects the feeling I have always had since I leave Japan. This in between sensation is recreated in “Individual Consciousness”. The viewer can not distinguish if he is looking inside or outside. The web of connections engulfs the room, creating a universe itself. Everyone carries a universe inside, and I want to connect this universe with the outside.
To reveal the similarities between nature and the human body creates a cosmos of its own. The roots of each individual blade of grass creating webs of connection like the blood vessels in our body. The grass reaching up while the black lines reaching down but never connecting, a feeling of longing but never touching. The installation “Webs of Connection” creates a sense of a distant reality, like a dream.
This exhibition creates a bridge between reality and a new world to be discovered, as art functions as an important foundation for our sense of reality, it is an epiphany of human consciousness and what lays behind.
——Chiharu Shiota

Chiharu Shiota is an internationally renowned artist known for using thread as her primary medium. Drawing from her personal life experiences and cosmic perspective, she presents a universal understanding of the world’s rules that can be felt by all humanity. In her early years, she studied painting but eventually set aside her brushes to use her own body as the main material in performance installations. Later, she began collecting everyday objects, such as windows, shoes, suitcases, beds, and pianos, and used thread to connect them, visually expressing her understanding of the body, relationships, and life and death. The artist brings together the life experiences and memories of different individuals to create a new world.
In February of this year, Shiota sent us her proposed exhibition title: Another Planet. I was delighted by the mysterious yet charming name, but also puzzled over how to convey in Chinese the idea of the “another planet” that Shiota wanted to invite the audience to explore. The museum team decided to harness the power of the community: we invited young artists under the age of 18 to suggest ideas for the Chinese title. We received dozens of naming proposals, ranging from humorous to deeply philosophical. When I saw one child had written “Echoes of the Universe,” it suddenly reminded me that my connection with Shiota actually began in 2019, when I had just visited her large-scale solo exhibition The Soul Trembles at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, drawn by her reputation. Later, I met Shiota in person at the Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art, where we established communication and expressed interest in future collaboration. However, due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, our exhibition plan was delayed. In 2021, to better understand Chengdu, Shiota visited the city while on a tour for her solo exhibition in China. We had a pleasant meeting and discussed potential exhibition formats. After international exchanges resumed in 2023, she returned to Chengdu, visited A4 Art Museum’s new venue at Luxetown Mountaintop Plaza, and we finalized the new exhibition’s works. Remarkably, it has been almost five years since our initial connection.
Even earlier, in 2015, I saw Chiharu Shiota’s work The Key in the Hand at the Japan Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. In the installation, 180,000 keys were suspended by red threads or placed inside old wooden boats. These keys, donated by people from different countries, seemed like fragmented pieces of bodies carrying memories and lost time, engulfing the entire space and overwhelming the audience. Although I had read various reports and documents about Shiota’s work, the overwhelming power of her spatial installations could only truly be felt in person.
In this exhibition at A4 Art Museum, three large-scale spatial installations are presented. Individual Consciousness features over a dozen old windows purchased from second-hand markets in Chengdu, interwoven with red threads. The Tang dynasty poet Du Fu wrote in Chengdu, “through the window, the eternal snows of Xiling Mountain glisten for a thousand years,” referring to the world beyond the window. Yet, the poet also exists outside the snowy mountain’s window. “Inside” and “outside” are just a fleeting thought away, and the red threads that connect people also link the “inside” and “outside” worlds. Webs of Connection is composed of black threads and grass. The roots of the grass form an underground network, while the black threads intertwine like a night sky. Although the night sky is real, it cannot touch the grass’s network, symbolizing the eternal contradiction in the universe—so close, yet never able to reach. The final installation, What do you wish for?, differs from Shiota’s previous works involving letters and wishes. This time, she is particularly interested in children’s wishes. We collected nearly 5,000 wishes, most of which came from children in Chengdu and Sichuan. Using white thread, which she associates with “beginnings,” the artist visualizes the children’s wishes as they flow through the space, presenting the echoes of their hopes for the world.
This exhibition itself is a response from all of us, five years later, to the world. During this time, we’ve experienced the pandemic, recovery periods, and ongoing conflicts. As the world was pulled apart, we were forced to rethink relationships, connections, and the future possibilities of the world, adjusting our plans along the way. Ultimately, Shiota chose a warm tone as the emotional foundation for the works exhibited in Chengdu—a reflection of the feelings this city and the A4 Art Museum team, along with the surrounding environment, evoked in her. Much like the 5,000 children’s wishes, this exhibition represents our greatest hopes for the future. As Shiota explained regarding Another Planet: “This planet can be mysterious, unknown, unsettling, but also adventurous and familiar.” In the end, I chose the suggestion of “Echoes of the Universe” from that child, naming the exhibition 宇宙回音.
The faint breaths of individual lives in this world gather together, and the entire universe reverberates. This is an echo from another world, an echo from both others and ourselves.

——Sunny Sun