5 things to know about Chiharu Shiota: Threads of Life

Through her work she explores deeply personal concerns, drawing upon her own life experiences but equally evoking universal ideas of memory, the body, human relationships and the fragility of existence. 

Between February and May 2026, the upper galleries of our Hayward Gallery were transformed with three floor-to-ceiling site-specific web-like installations by Shiota, allowing visitors to immerse themselves within the artist’s world.

Ahead of this exhibition – the artists’ first solo exhibition at a London public institution – we shared these five things to know about Chiharu Shiota.

She is known for large-scale immersive installations made of threads

In these works black, red or white threads fill entire rooms and connect everyday objects such as keys, shoes, beds, chairs, windows. Threads allow Shiota to express her feelings. When she works with string, her state of mind is reflected in what she weaves, whether that is something confused, intertwined, tangled, or knotted. The overlapping threads allow her to explore and expand. Only when her eyes are no longer able to follow the lines, does Shiota feel that the art work is complete and some truth has emerged from it. 

In During Sleep, black threads spread across the walls and ceilings, cocooning within them ten beds. This work came to be during her early years in Germany, when desperate to create a safe space of her own, Shiota began using threads to weave around her bed. The bed has since become a focal point for the artist, with the intricate black web a manifestation of dreams, illness and even death itself.

Her colour choices are carefully chosen

For Shiota black, red and white threads each carry symbolic meaning related to the cosmos, blood, life and death. Red recurs most often in the artist’s work, first appearing in her early performances from the late 1990s. Red has multiple associations, but perhaps the most resonant is ‘Un mei no Akai Ito’ or the ‘Red Thread of Fate’, an ancient myth in Japanese culture that when a child is born there is an invisible red thread tied around their finger. It is believed this thread is connected to another person and that the two are destined to meet. It is a belief that is held across many east Asian cultures in varied forms. Shiota often draws upon ‘Un mei no Akai Ito’ in her installations to emphasise human connections.

She has encouraged more than 10,000 people to give thanks

In 2013 Shiota’s work was exhibited in a solo show at Kochi’s Museum of Art. Kochi is her parents’ hometown and the museum was one of the first she had visited as a young child, so the experience prompted a personal reflection on her life in Germany and upbringing in Japan. 

From this reflection came the idea to invite people to write letters expressing their unspoken gratitude to something or someone in their life. Shiota wanted to collect letters from a wide range of people with different experiences and chose to suspend these words of thanks in the air, creating a space where emotions and connections would all become visible. 

Shiota and the museum collected 2,400 thank you letters for the first iteration of the work that has become known as Letters of Thanks, and the number continues to grow, every time the work is displayed in a new location. To date, letters have been collected from Japan, Brazil, Austria, Germany, and Denmark. The installation of this piece at the Hayward Gallery features 10,000 letters, including many from the artist’s archive, but also new letters collected from people in the UK specially for this exhibition.

She believes that ‘clothes make up our second skin’

The dress first appears as a motif in Shiota’s work in her 1999 installation After That, (later renamed Memory of Skin). Other early works see the dress appear as larger than life wedding dresses covered in mud, dirt, and the earth. Dresses have also been woven into webs, suspended from the ceiling or entrapped within box-like structures. These white dresses are often wedding dresses, but also evoke hospital attire, night gowns, robes and funeral shrouds, allowing for associations with states of human existence: marriage, dreaming, sleeping, illness and death. 

Throughout these appearances, Shiota explores the idea of clothing as a ‘second skin. She believes that garments, because they are with us every day, carry a ‘trace of life’. They carry intangible memories, but also a ghostly presence (in the absence) of the physical body, which cannot be erased or washed away even when we die.

She has designed stage sets for several theatre and dance productions

In 2003, Shiota collaborated with dancer Yuko Kaseki for the exhibition and dance performance All A Lone in Warsaw’s Ujazdowski Castle. She also created the stage design for Alex Novak’s Solitude at Stuttgart’s Akademie Schloss Solitude. Since then she has designed for a range of performances, including Oedipus Rex, performed by the Berlin-based dance company Dorky Park; Tattoo, directed by Toshiki Okada, which premiered at the New National Theatre, Tokyo; Matsukaze, choreographed by Sasha Waltz and composed by Toshio Hosokawa and Idomeneo, re di Creta directed and choreographed by Sidi Larbi Cherkaou.