Berlin-based Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota’s touring retrospective, The Soul Trembles, is currently on display at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, marking its North American debut following exhibitions across Asia, Australia, and Europe. The show features large-scale installations centered on Shiota’s signature use of miles of thread, woven into expansive, site-specific webs that transform gallery spaces into immersive and unfamiliar environments.
The exhibition includes two room-sized thread installations—one in black and the other in red—alongside a sculptural white thread piece suspended above the grand staircase in the museum’s Hornstein Pavilion. Shiota’s use of thread, often anchored to metal armatures shaped like boats, reflects recurring themes of migration, travel, memory, and familial connection, drawing from her own experience as an immigrant in Germany.
Throughout her 30-year career, Shiota has developed a distinctive approach characterized by large-scale works composed of repeated elements or accumulations of objects. Several pieces in the retrospective showcase thousands of thread overlaps, collections of old cracked windows, and hundreds of miniature dollhouse items. A highlight is Connecting Small Memories, an installation originally created for the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, where hundreds of small domestic objects are bound together by red thread, symbolizing links between memories, family, and DNA.
Another centerpiece, Uncertain Journey, presents a massive red web evoking various interpretations—from a voyage through the bloodstream to an apocalyptic landscape—inviting viewers into a space that feels both intimate and vast. A contrasting black web enveloping a charred piano, inspired by Shiota’s recollection of a neighboring house fire, introduces a somber, mournful tone.
While the artist’s early works included performance pieces and experimental body art, The Soul Trembles reveals a matured mastery of installation that relies on sensory and spatial engagement rather than overt narrative. Visitors at the museum’s members’ preview largely responded with intrigue to the powerful presence of the red web, while other installations provoked reflection on themes of memory, death, and transformation.
Supplementing the artworks, the exhibition features didactic texts and video interviews in which Shiota discusses her philosophy. She articulates a view of life and death as processes of dissolution rather than extinction, resonant with Japanese aesthetic ideas such as mono no aware, which contemplates the transience of existence.
The retrospective concludes with a presentation of Shiota’s career in stage design, showcasing documentation of sets created for opera and theater productions including Gotterdammerung, Oedipus Rex, and The Winter’s Tale. Her ability to shape immersive environments extends naturally into theatrical spaces, aligning with her broader artistic exploration of transition and transformation.
The Soul Trembles will be on view at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts through February 14.