Chiharu Shiota’s Latest Exhibition Wraps Guests in a Complex Red Thread Cocoon
In San Francisco, crimson threads now envelop a museum’s exhibitions. They crisscross over ceilings; they capture fragile sheets of paper within their strands; and they extend across wooden floors with garnet-colored tendrils. Entire realms are summoned solely through thread—and Chiharu Shiota is their creator. In Two Home Countries, now displayed at the Asian Art Museum, the Japanese artist doesn’t merely wish for us to explore these woven realms. She desires us to experience every memory they encapsulate.
Two Home Countries arrived at the Asian Art Museum earlier this month following a successful exhibition at the Japan Society in New York. The solo showcase, which marks Shiota’s first in the Bay Area, features various interventions by the artist, spanning immersive installations and sculptures to video and performance-based works. Regardless of their medium, each piece navigates psychological landscapes, grappling with absence, embodiment, and history.
“Shiota’s work resonates because it makes emotional states visible,” Soyoung Lee, the director and CEO of the Asian Art Museum, observes. “Her installations articulate the experience of navigating between places, histories, and identities—an experience that feels increasingly familiar to many today.”
Perhaps nothing exemplifies that notion better than Diary, a grand installation recreated specifically for the museum. Spanning an 88-foot pavilion, the monumental piece is not merely viewed or interpreted but experienced, inviting visitors to wander beneath a passageway crafted from red yarn. Looking up reveals handwritten diary pages, suspended by the intricate, threaded network. These pages are borrowed from personal journals written by Japanese soldiers during World War II and German civilians in the postwar era. Within this cocoon, a connection gradually emerges, linking us to a turbulent period in history as we journey through the installation. In doing so, the diaries surpass their role as static artifacts and become active voices, their narratives transcending time and space to reach us—and each other.
“Shiota is intrigued by what lingers after a person departs,” chief curator Robert Mintz clarifies. “In Diary, the voices of individuals who never intersected are brought into dialogue. The installation renders history personal, fragmented, and distinctly present.”
In addition to Diary, the exhibition also includes smaller installations, such as the titular Two Home Countries. This work portrays two metal houses, both unoccupied save for a cluster of red thread. Linking the structures is a dress-shaped sculpture made of red rope, its strands winding not only toward the houses but toward the ceiling. Collectively, Two Home Countries contemplates the liminal, dislocated space Shiota herself inhabits as someone straddling Japan and Germany.
“When I am in Germany, I long for Japan, and when I return to Japan, I yearn for Germany,” Shiota has expressed regarding her circumstance. “It is an in-between sensation.”
In that light, there’s a tension pulsing beneath the exhibition’s veneer. As we confront Shiota’s artistic perspective, history transforms from merely past to immediate; fear becomes tangible instead of abstract; and our lives resonate as the fleeting entities they are. And yet that’s precisely the intention. After all, Shiota perceives her practice as a reckoning, a confrontation between longing, vulnerability, memory, and, above all, our humanity.
“I create my art not as therapy,” Shiota once stated, adding that fear is, indeed, “essential to creating art.”
Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries is currently exhibited at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco through July 20, 2026.