“Gateway to Silence,” 2025. Antique porch, red wool.
Despite working predominantly with thread, Chiharu Shiota wants to be clear: her art should be read as paintings, not as cobwebs. For the Japanese artist, threads are brushstrokes, and her monumental installations are canvases, delicately painted and suspended in the air. “When I finally began using thread,” Shiota said in a recent interview with My Modern Met, “I felt like I found my own material. I could express my emotions.” Those emotions typically revolve around connection, memory, and, as the artist’s latest solo exhibition suggests, emptiness.
Now on view at the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing, Chiharu Shiota: Silent Emptiness encompasses several site-specific installations, incorporating local materials and, perhaps more importantly, posing questions that have long preoccupied Shiota. Throughout her career, the artist has often considered the relationship between presence and absence, especially as it relates to Eastern traditions such as Buddhism and Taoism. Silent Emptiness deepens Shiota’s studies, positing emptiness as not just tangible, but also remarkably tactile. Even in rooms so vast it seems nearly impossible to fill them, Shiota masterfully maneuvers thread around floors, walls, and ceilings, pointing out what remains empty and what has been covered.
“I always need to visit the museum space before I can think about what to create,” Shiota has said. “Only by seeing the space can I imagine what will fit.”
That sense of care is evident in Silent Emptiness, where each installation perfectly “integrates the architecture and space of Red Brick,” as Yan Shijie, the exhibition’s curator, remarks in a statement. Metamorphosis of Consciousness, for instance, reflects upon sleep and how, as a “journey beyond the body,” it resembles death. The piece consists of a simple bed with white sheets, and, floating above it, hundreds of transparent tendrils, each decorated with small lights and butterflies. Suddenly, the gallery space transforms into an ethereal and almost haunting atmosphere, where visitors must grapple with the limits of their bodies when compared to the boundlessness of their minds, dreams, or thoughts, even and perhaps especially in death.
Gateway to Silence is a similar provocation, causing a rift between reality and spirituality. The installation repurposes an ancient Tibetan Buddhist door, enveloped by a criss-crossing network of red threads. The door is the only remnant of a world familiar to us, as the red threads spread across the entire room. As the museum claims, it’s as though an “unseen force” has emerged from another dimension and broken through the Buddhist door, vaulting us into a setting beyond our comprehension. But the threads aren’t only “traces of rupture;” they’re also connectors, gently grazing visitors as they walk through the exhibition space.
In addition to these and other immersive installations, Silent Emptiness also features Shiota’s manuscripts, created specially for the exhibition, as well as archival photographs and video documentation. These materials hope to trace Shiota’s journey from Japan to her resounding success in the global contemporary art scene, and her evolution from painting to large-scale artworks.
“Using fiber as warp and ordinary objects as weft, Shiota weaves a contemporary interpretation of emptiness,” Red Brick says. “It is not a void but the freedom of all things arising through interdependence.”
Chiharu Shiota: Silent Emptiness is now open at the Red Brick Art Museum through August 31, 2025.
In her latest solo exhibition Silent Emptiness, Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota considers themes of emptiness and connection.
“Rooted Memories,” 2025. Red rope, boat, earth.
“Metamorphosis of Consciousness,” 2025. Mixed media.
“Echoes of Time,” 2025. Black yarn, rock.
“Metamorphosis of Consciousness,” 2025. Mixed media.
Staged at the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing, Silent Emptiness encompasses several large-scale, spatial installations, each incorporating local materials and Shiota’s signature thread.
“Gateway to Silence,” 2025. Antique porch, red wool.
“Metamorphosis of Consciousness,” 2025. Mixed media.
The exhibition is currently on view through August 31, 2025.
Installation view of Chiharu Shiota's “Rooted Memories” artwork at the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing, China.
“Multiple Realities,” 2025. Mixed media.
Installation view of “Chiharu Shiota: Silent Emptiness” at the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing, China.
Exterior view of the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing, China.
