For its 14th Carte blanche to contemporary art, the National Museum of Arts Asians – Guimet invites Chiharu Shiota.
An artist globally recognized
The Japanese artist, born in 1972, is globally recognized. She represented Japan in 2015 at the Biennial of Venice. The thread is its material, dreamlike, organic and intellectual, the one that gives forms to its immersive and paradoxical architectures. From the red thread – which predominates in his work – it invites us both to reflect on the links that surround us and the screens that separate us, on what undoes societies human while “web”, “networks” and “cloud” deceive us by their promises of reconciliation. As for many artists, planetary confinement was an opportunity for Chiharu Shiota to reflect on domestic space and the family cocoon. Famous throughout the world for his spectacular stretched-wire installations, the Japanese artist had to put his incessant wanderings on hold in 2020 for the first time in almost fifteen years.
An oppressive web
Confined to Berlin where she has lived for many years, this sudden stop has revived themes specific to the artist: immobility, silence, confinement, the uncertainty of destinies. For his first solo exhibition in a museum in France, the artist tackles MNAAG the shores of this new anxiety, that of the time of the Covid. With its son, Chiharu Shiota weaves an inextricable protective network around a daily become tiny; this scale, altogether new in his work, refers to his experience, to the experience of all of us, of isolation in our homes of doll. Each object was caught in a singular and oppressive web; in at the same time that each one reassured us, repaired us, he obsessed us until choking. In this confrontation between the monumentality of the architecture of threads and the trivial smallness of our finitude, the visitor will project his infinite reflections on his own journey through trials and periods of trouble.
National Museum of Asian Arts – Guimet
6, place d’Iéna, 75116 Paris
