The Brooklyn Rail

Blood red is the omnipresent color of Chiharu Shiota’s mid-career survey, Two Home Countries. The titular two countries are Japan, where Shiota was born in 1972, and Germany, where she has lived and worked since the mid-nineties. Both were defeated during World War II, each devastated and humiliated at the end of that conflict (this exhibition originally opened at the Japan Society in September of last year, commemorating the eightieth anniversary of the end of that war). One of the many things the exhibition reveals is how the after-effects of overwhelming calamity can linger in traumatized populations for generations. The exhibition was originally curated by Michele Bambling for the Japan Society in New York and was substantially expanded in its more spacious Asian Art Museum re-installation.

Entrance to the exhibition requires traversing a site-specific installation, titled Diary (2025), consisting of a tunnel formed of 88 feet of precisely stitched red yarn. The tunnel’s configuration is irregular, like a coral reef or a gigantic model of a circulatory system. 2500 photocopies of diary entries written by World War II Japanese military personnel are embedded like platelets in this elaborate web, some with English addenda asking that the diaries be returned to families should their authors be killed in combat. There are also fifty-three pages of wartime German diary pages (not photocopies) suspended in the yarn nets, all written by civilians attesting to the hardships of post-war survival.

An adjacent gallery contains an array of sculpture and mixed media works on canvas and paper, the large majority sporting sanguine colors while smaller figurative works come off as scenes from half-remembered nightmares. Here, the theme switches to Shiota’s experiences as a two-time cancer survivor, which coincided with her having a miscarriage. A tableau titled Inner Home (2024) features two disconnected superstructures of small, doll-sized houses, obviously intended to represent Shiota’s tentative rootedness in different home countries. These surround a hollow torso that represents the artist, connected by loops of wire and rope that crawls up a nearby wall like a clot of red vines. The works in the mixed-media series “Connected to the Universe” (2023–25) use red string and flowing red ink on paper or canvas to indicate a swirling, fantastical cosmos—as Shiota has stated, “red is the thread of fate.” Nearby, a quartet of small sculptures, each called Cell (2024–25), incorporates outer structures made of glass or tiny nets formed of wire or thread, all containing toxic-looking interiors alluding to how cancer cells can be contained, isolated, and metabolized. All of the paintings, drawings, and three-dimensional works presented in this section seem to bespeak Shiota’s efforts to imagine a positive outcome to her struggle with her life-threatening illness, personifying it as a dark, shadowy presence to be warded off by the vitality of the red shapes that often seem to attack it.

Two Home Countries includes several video works, all documenting performances executed by Shiota reflecting on her medical struggles. Earth and Blood (2013) is a six-channel work revealing the artist’s nude body interacting with what appears to be coiled snares of plastic tubing or red painted barbed wire. Her face is never visible in the camera’s frame, even when she smears red paint on a glass surface through which the camera views her. A single-channel video highlights Shiota’s work as a stage designer for the play KINKAKUJI (2025), a treatment of Yukio Mishima’s 1956 novel of the same name (translated as The Temple of the Golden Pavilion). Its plot involves a deranged Buddhist monk who burns down an ancient temple. In the exhibition, we see a video projection of an actor playing the part of Mishima’s mentally unstable protagonist, viewed through a small forest of vertically installed plastic tubes that refract the projected light to exacerbate a dream-like effect. KINKAKUJI was performed live during the Japan Society’s installation, suggesting that we see the subsequent video installation as a documentation of that earlier performance, as well as a stand-alone work in its own right.

By the time Shiota relocated to Berlin, she had already absorbed the lessons of Osaka-based Gutai artists such as Kazuo Shiraga and Atsuko Tanaka, even though that group officially disbanded in 1972. That move put her in closer proximity to the legacy of the Vienna Action Group, particularly the work of Hermann Nitsch, another multi-media artist who made extensive works with blood-red colors. Two Home Countries brings the urgent poetics of those historical moments back to us from a time before “immersive installations” became big ticket, corporate entertainment. Certainly, there is some amount of spectacle in this exhibition, but not nearly so much as to overwhelm the transcendent vulnerability that is the hallmark of Chiharu Shiota’s work.