I first encountered the work of Chiharu Shiota on 25 June 2015 in the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The Key in the Hand was spellbinding. The exhibition included two Venetian boats surrounded by oodles of red threads, each with a key hanging from it. As the threads cascaded over the boats and then rose up to the ceiling between them, it was as if the vessels were sailing on reverse waves. Photographs and video works enhanced and complicated the narratives Shiota explored. The exhibition stayed with me.
My second encounter with Shiota’s work was in February this year at Te Papa. The Web of Time (until late 2021) sees 3750 balls of black wool strung and tangled over the double-storey gallery space, creating a ribcage of black lengths and ties. White numerals (0 to 9) sit in crannies where the threads meet. Visitors can get up close to the work, walking through and beneath it. The Web of Time creates a vision of the night sky with its black wool and the numbers-slash-stars peeking out from its depths.
A week after my visit, I begin reflecting on the nexus of these two works by Shiota. What makes her a successful artist? Born in Osaka in 1972, Shiota now lives and works in Berlin and is firmly entrenched in contemporary art. She is best known for her large-scale installations, which often include a huge amount of woollen thread and everyday objects such as chairs, boats, suitcases and keys – but her practice is much more than that. In Becoming Painting (1994), Shiota covered her entire body with red enamel paint, which gradually burned away at her skin and hair. During the performance she tried to feel what it was to be an artwork, finding the process liberating. Through the 1990s Shiota continued to transition and extend her practice beyond painting towards installation, performance, sculpture and photography. Thematically, the artist is concerned with the human condition, with personal and collective emotions and existence. The Web of Time bears out these interests: it seeks to unite people with a universal language and explore what it is to be human.
Certainly, as Shiota’s reputation grew, large-scale installations became the sure-fire hit of her oeuvre. The 2019 work Crossroads at the Honolulu Biennial—in which historical maps were swept up in a tornado of red thread—convinced curators at Te Papa that Shiota’s art was globally resonant and important to bring to New Zealand. As well as commissioning The Web of Time—Te Papa’s first major solo exhibition by a contemporary Japanese artist—they acquired the work for the permanent collection, expanding the museum’s collection of art from the Pacific rim.
Te Papa presents its exhibitions for a wide viewership and for people who may not have a background in art, and The Web of Time is nicely designed to engage this audience. The interpretation around the exhibition is fairly light—appropriate for people who don’t want or need a heavy spiel about who the artist is and what the exhibition is doing. However, I was left wanting more context and information to chew on, and I can’t help but think that, for an art audience or visitors who want to go deeper into the work, there is not enough additional information beyond the few reference books provided outside the exhibition space.
Shiota’s practice is interesting and complex, and I wish these multiple layers and discourse had been offered around The Web of Time. Instead, a television screen at the entrance to the exhibition displays visitors’ Instagram posts. Taking photos for Instagram in a gallery space is OK, of course—I do it myself and it’s the way of the modern world. This work by its nature encourages photography—it is spectacular! Te Papa is right, The Web of Time is a global connector and universally appealing, but I don’t think the social media method of engagement needs to be pushed so heavily.
Beyond the Instagram-friendly visuals and rhetoric of universal connections is something far deeper. There is a real darkness to The Web of Time—this begins in the title and in what we see, a web of numbers. Webs are used to hold on to creatures and organisms, killing them slowly. As we walk through the web we become part of it and its decaying hum. The numbers no longer sit nestled in the nooks; they are held hostage, stapled to the lines that keep them in place. One plausible reading is that The Web of Time makes reference to the World Wide Web. In this way the artwork creates and allows us to interact with another online world—one which we may navigate with trepidation and uncertainty. Perhaps the Instagram display screen at the entrance is apt after all.
The black wool Shiota uses also may be read as a symbol of the cosmos. In this narrative we look into The Web of Time as into a night sky. We cannot control the cosmos. We stare into the black abyss, wondering what is out there and what our place is here. The night sky is everything to us, and also nothing. We are very small in reality.
The exhibition text for The Web of Time suggests that the numerals in the work “represent meaningful dates in history, both collective and personal”. Numbers certainly tell us when we were born, symbolise when we die, and the important times in between. They also provide insights, weighty or trivial, into who we are – illustrate how much we have in our bank accounts, how much we weigh, how many friends we have, how many coffees we drink in a week. Numbers are both meaningful and, without context, meaningless.
What else do numbers do? In the uncertain past year, we have been surrounded by them—1pm briefings, four alert levels, weeks of lockdown, rising Covid-19 case numbers, and a certain, countable number of days since we’ve seen overseas family or friends (for one of my dearest family members, 393 at the latest tally). Numbers can bring fear and hope. In Chiharu Shiota’s personal account, numbers might be bound up with illness. The artist was diagnosed with cancer in 2017, after 12 years in remission. In these terms, numerals might represent a number of chemotherapy sessions, the stage of disease, the amount of time left. Are the numbers counting down?
“Numbers comfort us,” Shiota has said. “We share dates that are important to us, and they help us understand ourselves.” There is certainly a repetitive and healing quality to her work. Shiota’s artworks feel recursive in form and material—to put them up takes mindful time and concentration. Some of us find repetitive tasks like these soothing and comforting, though Shiota has also said that the work of hanging thread is actually more difficult than cathartic. But perhaps fear and struggle is sometimes necessary to help us move beyond our internal anxieties.
The repetitions of The Web of Time and some of Shiota’s other artworks evoke a Japanese-art sensibility, and connections to the work of other Japanese artists can easily be made. Artists such as Yayoi Kusama, On Kawara and Tatsuo Miyajima use repetitiveness in their practices to reflect and engage with the world around us. Kawara and Miyajima in particular use numbers and dates; and Kusama’s work has often explored the possibilities of repetition and the healing nature of art. Her installations can work as expressions of her own psychology and health, and when she covers entire surfaces in dots or lights, Kusama gestures to the repetitions of infinity. When I stood inside Kusama’s Where the Lights in My Heart Go (2016), I felt the same infinite entrapment that I feel in Shiota’s work. The small holes in Kusama’s 10-by-10-foot mirrored box allowed light in to sparkle and reflect around. Shiota’s web of entanglement and the starry numbers peeping through feel similar.
Shiota’s restricted palette (red, black and white) and use of numbers also nod to Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara, who painted his repetitive Today series every day, with the day’s date, from 4 January 1966 until his death in 2014. There were strict limitations to Kawara’s series—each painting was one of eight uniform sizes and used white text on either blue, red or grey paint—but also endless opportunities. In contrast, Tatsuo Miyajima’s practice has focused on numbers as language and as a symbol of life and death. His practice draws from his early experiences of being in hospital and having his ward- mates die. In one recurring performance work, Miyajima pushes people to consider the unpredictability of life and to cherish it. Volunteers walk while counting backwards from nine to zero—at zero they fall to the floor, pretending to die; the performance representing the ebb and flow of life and death. I also think of anaesthetists asking us to count backwards from 10 as we are put under.
Like the work of her fellows, Shiota’s work always goes back to the life-and-death fundamentals of what it is to be human. Those ideas are something we can’t escape, even if we try. I think about Shiota’s white numbers again, up in the cosmos. I can see them as depressing, counting down the days, representing the little, passing time I have left with loved ones. Or I can see them as hopeful, as all the future possibilities, the times and dates I have yet to make special. This is how I see Shiota’s work as healing. To heal ourselves we sometimes have to go to dark places first. Many weeks after seeing the installation at Te Papa, I am still caught up in the web.
Chiharu Shiota’s The Web of Time is at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, until late 2021.
