‘Everyone’s different. Everyone’s connected.’
(Chiharu Shiota)
‘While we live our lives separately, we are, at the same time, deeply connected’
This is a weird and wonderful, beguiling and genuinely ‘immersive’ exhibition. Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota was born in Osaka in 1972 but has lived and worked in Berlin, Germany since 1996. ‘Threads of Life’ is her first major solo exhibition in a London public gallery. As a retrospective it includes examples of:
- drawings
- early performance videos
- photographs
But the blockbuster items are the three big gallery-sized installations in which thousands of yards of woollen thread have been intricately woven into dazzling webs and cocoons, strange disorientating mazes which eerily incorporate everyday objects such as shoes, keys, beds, chairs and dresses. The show includes other, less dramatic works, but let’s look at the three big showstoppers first.
1. Threads of Life (2026)
‘Threads that bind us to life, to others, the complex ties that not only bind us to one another and to the world, but also to the memories that are always shaping the cycle of life. networks of relationships and meaning…’
In the Hayward’s biggest upstairs gallery, thousands of yards of bright red wool have been intertwined to create an enormously complicated web of fine filaments covering the whole ceiling and coming down the walls of this big gallery, and from this mesh dangle what the visitor assistant told me is no fewer than 20,000 old keys. And there, abandoned in the middle of this strange entanglement, is the frame of an old wooden, double door, set partly open.
Installation view of Chiharu Shiota at the Hayward Gallery showing the largest installation, ‘Threads of Life’ (photo by the author)
Curators talk a lot about ‘immersive experiences’ but because it comes down from the ceiling at you, and covers the walls and intrudes onto the floorspace it really did feel ‘immersive’. Also the sheer redness, unadulterated, uninterrupted, unrelieved red, the gallery lights shining through the intricate web and turning everything red, red, red. It felt like something urgent and important was happening. What does Shiota herself say?
‘I believe that people are connected by an invisible thread. Some call this ‘the red string of fate,’ but I use red thread because it also resembles the colour of blood. Like threads, human relationships can be tight, loose, dense, cut, or knotted…’
And the keys? Twenty thousand rusty old, second-hand worn keys. What do they symbolise except 20,000 precious locations, places people wanted to keep secure and private – homes, rooms, cupboards, trunks and boxes, safe spaces, protected spaces, locations of experiences and memories and values. And now deracinated, removed from their sources and meanings, from their previous owners, and now dangling from blood red skeins. Why?
Installation view of Chiharu Shiota at the Hayward Gallery showing some of the 20,000 keys hanging by intricate webs of red thread from the ceiling (photo by the author)
And the doors, the double doors, ajar enough for visitors to walk through – what are you walking into? And out of? What happens when you walk through the door? As when Alice stepped through the looking glass. Doors can mark the boundary between the public and private, the known and unknown, the past and the future. Interestingly, lot of visitors were walking round and round the room but very few walking through the obvious opening, as if daunted. Unafraid, I walked self-consciously through the parted portals and nothing happened… or did it?
Installation view of Chiharu Shiota at the Hayward Gallery showing the open doors at the centre of ‘Threads of Life’ (photo by the author)
Another thing: these doors had a lock so the obvious questions arises: which of the 20,000 keys unlocked these doors? As in a fairy story, as in a fable. If I’d been visiting with my young children I’d have asked them to suggest which key was The Key, the Key To The Door and set them off hunting. As Shiota puts it:
‘Although each of our lives is different, we all hold a key in our hands, and with that key, you feel anything is possible. It secures your home, but it can also open the door to new opportunities. My work offers the chance to experience something different from ordinary life: the chance to enter another realm and see the red threads that are invisible in the [real] world, but are impossible to live without.’
2. Letters of Thanks (2026)
Into the next gallery and a variation on the theme: instead of tangled skeins we have thousands of small-gauge ropes , dyed the identical same primary red as in the key room, but this time hanging directly down from the high ceiling until just above the floor. But once again that’s not all, there is another component: as the key room enmeshed thousands of keys, so these hanging threads are interspersed with hundreds and hundreds of sheets of paper, folding, curled, suspended in mid-flutter, frozen in space and time as they appear to fall from the white ceiling.
Installation view of Chiharu Shiota at the Hayward Gallery showing ‘Letters of Thanks’ (photo by the author)
What are they? Thank you letters. Shiota tells us that she wanted to convey her gratitude to her father, who worked so hard for his family but fond it easiest to do in a letter and this prompted thoughts about how it’s often easiest to bare deep emotions in the objective form of writing than by saying them.
And so the genesis of this iterative work: every time the work is exhibited, Shiota invites people to share their own thank you letters, and she proceeds to embed them in the next iteration. This the work includes, in tumbling mid-flight, letters from Brazil, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Japan, and now London.
And clearly the cosmopolitan nature of contemporary art, and Shiota’s many destinations, themselves weave a kind of invisible web of connections. You can imagine a thread following the airplanes she takes round the world, weaving red threads round the globe. And then you could kind of dig deeper, look closer, and imagine the hundreds, probably thousands of thank you letters she’s received and embedded in the work, and the myriad connections those make out to their loved ones, parents, partners, children and so on. Macro and micro meshes.
This exhibition reflects the often-hidden connections between us, with each thread becoming a trace of our shared existence, weaving visible forms from the invisible threads of life. Through my work, I try to make sense of life and its uncertainties; each installation has grown from personal experiences, such as losing my father, facing death and questioning what it means to be human. With this exhibition, I want to highlight the marvellous aspects of ordinary existence.’
3. During Sleep (2026)
The third blockbuster installation is in another big gallery space and consists of half a dozen basic metal beds, such as you might find in an army barracks, laid out in an orderly pattern so you can walk up one aisle, round the end and back out of the gallery – but the point is that these banal objects are enmeshed in an even more invasive, consuming cocoon of thousands and thousands of internetted threads, this time coloured minatory black.
Installation view of Chiharu Shiota at the Hayward Gallery showing ‘During Sleep’ (photo by the author)
The red key room felt wonderful, liberating and life-enhancing whereas, presumably because of the colour black, and the stark contrast between the black thread and the white sheets and pillows and metal frames of the bed – black and white – this space felt both colder and more claustrophobic and downright spooky. Shiota provides a detailed explanation:
‘When I moved to Germany I moved nine times in three years. Every time I changed where I slept, I’d wake up unable to recognise where I was. While sitting in bed, I picked up some yarn and started weaving it around my body, desperate to create a space of my own. It was like painting in the air. The black threads enveloped the bed just like a cocoon.’
So for her the thing appears to have a comforting, protective motivation but I must say it worked the opposite for me. I am scared of spiders and this made me feel like I was entering an enormous spider’s web with a barely suppressed feeling of panic that somewhere, lurking just out of sight, must be an enormous spider. It reminded me of the horrible scene in ‘Lord of the Rings’ where Frodo and Sam find themselves in the pitch black caves of the giant spider, Shelob, monster of nightmares. Or other old-timers like me might remember the famous Dr Who episode from the 1960s where a monster takes over the London Underground and spins a horrifying cocoon of sticky webs which trap its victims.
Well, Shiota’s aim is nothing like that. She goes on to explain that, as part of the exhibition, on certain days, performers are going to get into the beds and lie there for a time, impressing the beds with their weight and shape and warmth.
‘At certain times during the exhibition, performers sleep in the beds. I like the shape of the sheets after someone has slept in them. Each person leaves a different one and I can see their former existence in those traces. A sleeping person occupies the gap between dreaming and reality. To me, death might be the perfect sleep. It represents a new state of existence within the cycle of life, one that moves towards a larger universe.’
Very restful, calm and civilised. I could see the outlines in the beds and sheets where these performers had already slept and I understand the intention. Shiota intends the work to depict a kind of haunting of the real world by ghostly absences. But I couldn’t get past my own sense of uncanny, spooky and barely-suppressed horror.
Installation view of Chiharu Shiota at the Hayward Gallery showing ‘During Sleep’ (photo by the author)
Another web work
State of Being (Dress) (2025)
Between the huge key room and the narrow dangling help note room is what looks like a vitrine, large enough to hold what looks like a white wedding dress, but engulfed in an amazingly intricate web of black thread. Again, total black against total white. Maybe white purity occluded by the thousand striations of real life. Or the purity of the dram world or ideal life, imprisoned in ten thousand compromises and preventions.
Installation view of Chiharu Shiota at the Hayward Gallery showing ‘State of being: Dress’ (photo by the author)
As usual my response is more intense (and negative) than Shiota’s etherial intention:
‘In my work, I use found objects that I come across in my daily life. These items represent an absent person whose story I can never truly know, yet they help me feel connected to universal human experiences. Clothing, in particular, reflects this idea. When we wear our clothes, the fabric accumulates our feelings and memories. It is like a second skin. In the absence of the body, a shell of our existence remains – a state of our being. Piling up layer upon layer of threads creates the entirety of the universe bound within this framed space. When I can no longer trace a single line with my eye, the sculpture is complete. At that point, I feel as if I am able to glimpse what lies beyond, and touch the truth.’
Non-web works
These four web-and-thread works are all relatively recent. As you proceed into the exhibition you go back in time to earlier works from Shiota’s career, specifically to three earlier and non-thread-based pieces.
Video: Wall (2010)
On the stairs to the upstairs gallery you come across a video screen showing all 3 minutes and 39 seconds of ‘Wall’. In this video 38-year-old Shiota is lying naked on a white floor and is covered with a spaghetti tangle of white plastic tubing. As the video proceeds in flickering time-lapse jumps, we discover the tubes are hollow because one by one they fill with a red liquid, red the colour of blood, slowly spurting through all the tubes until a tangle of white tubes has become a tangle of red ones.
Installation view of Chiharu Shiota at the Hayward Gallery showing ‘Wall’ (photo by the author)
Surprisingly, this started from a meditation on the concept of walls:
‘I had wanted to create a work around the theme of walls for a long time. I took photographs of the Berlin Wall and the Western Wall in Jerusalem, but I decided to focus instead on the ‘walls’ within our bloodstream: family, nationality, religion, and other boundaries to do with the human condition. These walls give us comfort and a sense of identity, yet they can also strangle us. In Wall, my body is entangled in red tubes resembling blood vessels, as if the body has been turned inside out, revealing everything that is carried in our blood on the outside.’
I haven’t yet mentioned that there is an audio track on the film which is a slow human heartbeat:
‘The heartbeat of a fetus inside the womb forms the soundtrack, encapsulating my sense of the many things I have experienced over the years – such as illness, pregnancy, miscarriage, and childbirth.’
Try and Go Home (1997)
This feels very basic and entry-level compared to the mature sophistication of the web works. It simply consists of six black and white photos depicting a performance. According to her own account, Shiota moved to Germany in 1996 and enrolled in the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg. Here she took a course with performance artist Marina Abramović who told them to write down one word. ‘Japan’ immediately came to Shiota’s mind.
Her account then jumps to the idea that she went out to the countryside and dug a hollow in the ground. She proceeded to take off all her clothes and performed the attempt to crawl back to the place she wanted to go home to. Again and again she tried, again and again she couldn’t get very far into the cave and rolled back down the slope, obviously becoming more dirty and muddy with every attempt.
Which is why the exhibition presents us with these six photos, presumably taken by a colleague and partner in the performance, of her naked body in various parts of the burrow-and-roll process.
Installation view of Chiharu Shiota at the Hayward Gallery showing six photos from ‘Try and Go Home’ (photo by the author)
This is so far removed from the webworks as to feel like the works of a completely different artist. On the other hand, it is obviously linked to the video by Shiota’s willingness to get naked, to photograph and film herself naked, and to display herself naked in a public gallery for tens of thousands of visitors to look at. Make of that what you will.
The Trainee (2023 to 2024)
Much more recent is another work which, initially, seems completely unrelated to the web works. In the early 2020s Shiota was asked to create illustrations for a novel. Yoko Tawada’s novel ‘The Trainee’ is set in Germany in the 1980s and follows a young woman who works at a book distribution company. It draws from Yoko’s own experience of moving to Germany around the same time, where she felt like she was starting a second life.
The novel was serialised in the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun and Shiota created pictures to accompany its daily publication. It was a case of trial and error. Her first illustrations derived from underlining words and transforming them into pictures but when she saw them in print they felt too dark. So she developed a new approach which was to use coloured wrapping and origami paper and interweave them with her trademark red thread. Aha! Return of the threads!
The final result was nearly 400 watercolour and charcoal drawings and collages, each stitched with her signature red threads and they are all exhibited here in one wall-length display.
Installation view of Chiharu Shiota: Threads of Life. Drawings for Yoko Tawada’s Praktikantin (The Trainee) Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy of the Hayward Gallery © DACS, London, 2026 and Chiharu Shiota
To be honest, I was still so dazzled by the big web rooms that I found it difficult to readjust my sense of scale and response to these relatively small and detailed works. Especially as I had no idea what the plot of the novel was that they’re illustrating. And especially since there are so many of them. To my mind they required a completely different sense of scale and attention than the big web rooms which had completely bowled me over.
Video of Shiota at work and explaining
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