Please note: The museum will be closed to the public on Thursday, Feb 5.
Please note: The museum will be closed to the public on Thursday, Feb 5.
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Feb 1, 2026
San Francisco, FEB. 1, 2026 — To step into the Asian Art Museum’s spring exhibition Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries is to enter a space where memory hangs overhead — vast, intimate, and inescapable. Threads of red yarn stretch across the gallery like veins or neural pathways, suspending handwritten diary pages and fragments of lived experience. Visitors do not stand apart from the work; they move through it, their bodies woven into the artist’s meditation on identity, displacement, and what it means to belong.
On view at the Asian Art Museum from April 3 to July 27, 2026, Two Home Countries marks the first solo museum exhibition in the Bay Area by internationally acclaimed Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota.
Installed in the museum’s Yang Yamazaki Pavilion, the largest of its special exhibition galleries, the presentation brings together immersive installations, sculpture, video, and performance-related works that span Shiota’s career, mapping a varied emotional terrain. The result is an experience that is as physical as it is psychological — quietly awe-inspiring, deeply human, and deliberately unresolved.
Shiota, born in Osaka in 1972 and based in Berlin since the mid-1990s, is best known for her monumental thread installations that envelop architectural space. Using thread as both line and structure, she creates environments that feel at once delicate and powerful. Everyday objects — keys, shoes, documents, dresses — are embedded within these webs, standing in for absent bodies and lives once lived. Over time, yarn became Shiota’s primary medium, replacing early performance work in which she used her own body as a canvas.
The artist has experienced a surge in international visibility in the last year: in addition to a major retrospective in Turin traveling from Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, solo exhibitions of her work are currently on view in New York City, Istanbul, Milan, and Vienna.
“Chiharu Shiota’s work resonates because it makes emotional states visible,” said Soyoung Lee, The Barbara Bass Bakar Director and CEO of the Asian Art Museum. “Her installations speak to the experience of living between places, histories, and identities — an experience that feels increasingly familiar to many people today.”
Two Home Countries unfolds across four sections, each deepening the artist’s exploration of memory, absence, and embodiment. The exhibition opens with Diary, a large-scale installation re-created specifically for the Asian Art Museum. Overhead, handwritten diary pages are suspended in a dense web of red yarn, creating a passageway that visitors walk beneath. The pages come from personal journals written by Japanese soldiers during World War II and by German civilians in the postwar period. Together, they form an intimate and indelible archive of human experience across national and historical boundaries.
“Shiota is interested in what remains after a person is gone,” explained Dr. Robert Mintz, the museum’s Director of Curatorial Affairs. “In Diary, the voices of individuals who never met are brought into conversation. The installation makes history feel personal, fragmented, and profoundly present.”
Shiota has spoken about encountering similar traces while browsing flea markets in Berlin — photographs, passports, journals — objects saturated with lives no longer there. The installation also draws inspiration from the Japanese literature scholar Donald Keene, who described translating diaries written by Japanese soldiers during World War II as a deeply intimate encounter with people he would never meet.
At the center of the exhibition is Two Home Countries, the work that gives the show its title. Two metal house forms are connected by a dress-shaped structure made of red rope, its wiry strands reaching toward each home while trailing out and upward. Houses and dresses recur often in Shiota’s work as stand-ins for bodies and lives. Here, they become a poignant expression of bicultural existence — of living between Japan and Germany, never fully anchored in one place.
“When I am in Germany, I miss Japan, and when I return to Japan, I miss Germany,” Shiota has said. “It is an in-between sensation.”
From this portal into memory, the exhibition moves into Shiota’s engagement with performance and theater. Materials related to KINKAKUJI (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion), a theatrical work commissioned by the Japan Society in New York, highlight her role as a stage designer. Presented by the San Francisco International Arts Festival (SFIAF) in association with U.S./Japan Cultural Trade Network, Inc. and Theatre of Yugen, the West Coast premiere of KINKAKUJI will be performed three times in early May at Z Space theater as part of the SFAIF 2026 Festival Program. The production, based on Yukio Mishima’s novel about obsession and destruction, uses suspended cords and shifting light to extend the performer’s movements through space. Documentation of the work appears in Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries alongside Shiota’s sketches and projections, emphasizing the porous boundary between installation and performance.
The final section, Embodiment, confronts the physical body directly. Drawing from Shiota’s experiences with illness, particularly her battles with cancer, these works grapple with fear and survival. Glass forms resembling internal organs press against wire nets in Cells, while Beyond My Body suspends sheets of incised leather above a pair of bronze feet, evoking skin, absence, and the fragmentation of the self. These works are not offered as catharsis or healing, but as honest reckonings with mortality.
“I make my art not as therapy,” Shiota has said. “Fear is necessary to make art.”
Taken together, Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries resists easy resolution. It asks viewers to sit with uncertainty — with longing, vulnerability, and the persistence of memory. In doing so, it offers something rare: an exhibition that does not explain away the complexity of being human, but instead gives it form, space, and breath.
Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries was organized by Japan Society, New York, and was curated by Michele Bambling, Senior Director, Japan Society Gallery. Support is provided by Kirsten Wolfe.
Sustained support generously provided by the Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang Endowment Fund for Exhibitions and the Kao/Williams Contemporary Art Exhibitions Fund.
About the Asian Art Museum
Located in the heart of San Francisco, the museum is home to one of the world’s finest collections of Asian and Asian American art, with more than 20,000 awe-inspiring works ranging from ancient jades and ceramics to contemporary video installations. Dynamic special exhibitions, cultural celebrations, and public programs for all ages provide rich art experiences that unlock the past and spark questions about the future.
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Installation view of Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries at Japan Society Gallery, New York, 2025. Photograph by Waso Danilenko.
