The Art of Chiharu Shiota
These days everybody is a rolling stone. More people than ever live in a place that’s far from the town where they were born or raised. We are all, to some degree or another, on foreign ground—grappling with what it means to feel like a newcomer, to long for connection, and to feel, at times, disoriented and displaced.
Japanese born artist, Chiharu Shiota address those mixed feelings—and speaks to that tender, exposed part of us that longs for sanctuary—and lives in ambiguity, not quite knowing quite where home is, or what it’s made of. Shiota creates large-scale installations to explore how we collect memories and form connections as we move or travel tells mythic stories about our longing for home and connection. Her room-sized installations make us think about our own experience of home and connection. At her recent show at the ICA Watershed in Boston, she weaves these tales together, using miles of string. This is such an eloquent choice. Her work reminds us that our own daily existence is often suspended by a thread. And it brings to mind the heart-breaking case described by the psychiatrist D.W. Winnicott. A boy whose parents were on the verge of separating trying to hold his family together my binding the living room chairs and coffee table together, with a ball of twine. Yes, home sometimes hangs together by a thread. And as someone whose moved 33 times, I can tell you this. Shiota’s exhibition hits deep and brings back all your dreams of home, and all your unmet longings. You are lost, for a time, in your own inner world—and in the archetypal journey that surroundings our story of longing and belonging, and contributes to our own ideal of home.
This luminous and thought provoking show features a piece called Accumulation – Searching for the Destination, and a newly commissioned work, Home Less Home.
In Accumulation – Searching for the Destination, dozens of vintage suitcases hang from red rope, shaking and swaying as the viewer walks among them. Shiota took one suitcase with her when she moved from Japan to Berlin in 1996. For her a suitcase symbolizes the start of a new journey—anticipation—sense of being suspended in the moment, neither here, nor there. Her work speaks to the fact that we are living in an uncertain world, where a home can disappear and depend largely on our own wit and improvisation. And on something more—a bit of luck, a strange affinity for a place, a moment of acceptance. A single breath. An act of grace.
Home Less Home features a field of red and black ropes in the shape of a house. Here, Shiota suspends important documents—passports, immigration papers, letters and messages from family or friends. She adds beds, desks, chairs, and tables to indicate a sense of arrival. And also to show the basic building blocks we used to create our homes. However, this place is deliberately ambiguous, and the viewer feels suspended between one place and the next. It’s the opposite of a bee frozen in amber. This is more like being trapped in space. We are neither here not there. And forever in transit from one place to another.
Part of the Boston Public Art Triennial 2025, the ICA exhibition is Chiharu Shiota’s first solo presentation in New England. To open a dialogue, Shiota asked members of the public to contribute images and stories which she then printed and integrated into Home Less Home. Born in 1972 in Osaka, Shiota now lives and works in Berlin. This show represents her own journey, as well.
The title of this exhibit is provocative. What is home less home? For centuries, home was the fixed foot of the compass. The place we returned to after all our journeying. The wife and son—and the old family dog—that Odysseus returns to at the end of his heroic journey. The windswept farm in Kansas where Dorothy wakes up after her surreal trip to Oz—relieved to be in her own bed.
Now we travel in an arc so wide that the foot of the compass sometimes slips, leaving us adrift. Perhaps home less home, means going back to ground zero. Knowing what makes us feel at home. And how to console ourselves when it’s time to remake it. —- Valerie Andrews
Learn more about Chiharu Shiota’s life and work from the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston, and from her own website. Until January 2026, you can see her exhibit, “Two Home Countries,” at The Japan Society in New York.
