Chiharu Shiota was born in 1972 in Osaka Prefecture, and grew up in Kishiwada City. From 1992 to 1996, she studied oil painting at the Art Department of Kyoto Seika University, while also working as an assistant to Muraoka Saburo (1928-2013) in the Sculpture Department. During this time she studied abroad at the Australian National University School of Art in Canberra, and began making performances and installations. At the age of nineteen, she saw a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Shiga by the Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930-2017), which inspired Shiota to plan to go to Germany so that she could study under Abakanowicz.



After a long and involved process, Shiota went to Europe in 1996 and enrolled at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg. She subsequently studied with the performance art pioneer Marina Abramovic (1946-) at the Braunschweig University of Art from 1997 to 1998, and then with Rebecca Horn (1944-) at Berlin University of the Arts. Since then, Shiota has been based in Berlin, actively showing her works at biennales and exhibitions at art museums and galleries. From 1993 up until 2021, she has exhibited at more than 300 solo shows, group exhibitions, biennales, and other events.



The countless lines of black and red traced out in thread allude to various phenomena and a complex array of links and connections, while also beckoning us towards the deepest reaches of existence, constituting one of her most representative artwork series. At the root of these works lie Shiota’s incessantly-pursued themes of life and death, as well as a fundamental inquiry into what we all pursue in life, and where we are heading.