Blood, mud and cobwebs create ache of heartbreak at Asian Art Museum

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“One chopstick is ‘I,’” said the Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota, “but you need two chopsticks to eat.” She made the remark in front of the three videos of her performance art pieces (“Wall,” “Bathroom,” and “Earth and Blood”) in her new exhibition “Two Home Countries” opened April 3 at the San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum. 

They are the most difficult pieces in the show, grappling with themes of miscarriage, cancer and death with the raw, physical materials of blood and mud. Even though the pieces emerged from her intensely private experiences, she hopes that by representing the personal through art, she can make the “I” into a “We” — just like her example of the chopsticks. 

Yet Shiota is most well-known for her pieces crafted from intricate webs of yarn, which is how “Two Home Countries” opens. Walking through a red-laced tunnel stuck with pages of text — which are authentic copies of diary entries from Japanese soldiers during World War II — the viewer has a transportive feeling of being sucked into another space and time. 

It took ten people two weeks to install the work “Diary,” which used 20 miles of red yarn and was crafted specifically for the Asian Art Museum. The network of yarn embodies the soldiers’ memories and also echoes the form of neural networks with its crisscrossing patterns, an intentional choice by the artist. Once again, an intimate interior of the body becomes externalized — and also reflected in shadows on the gallery floor. 

Shiota already experienced immense success with her intricate yarn designs at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Yet it was not a celebratory time; she also was suffering from a diagnosis of ovarian cancer. It led her to explore this subject at length in her work. 

The piece “Beyond My Body,” which includes a bronze cast of the artist’s feet with a porous suede net funneling away from them, emerged from Shiota’s experience of chemotherapy. “My feet are standing,” she said, “but my body, my soul is not connected anymore.” The theme carries over into “Cell,” in which glass and fabric objects suggest cancerous growths with their fragility — in contrast to the steadfastness of Shiota’s bronze cast feet in “Beyond My Body.” Shadows from the intricate web are again cast onto the floor, creating another layer to the work.

The color red dominates the exhibition: in yarn, in thread, in leather, in blood. For Shiota, it symbolizes many things. “It’s the family, the nationality, the religion, the culture,” she said. It’s encoded in the piece the exhibition is named after. 

“Two Home Countries” symbolizes the tension between Shiota’s native Japan and adopted Germany; in each country, she misses the other. Yet despite the exhibition’s namesake artwork, it’s the visceral themes of body, blood and memory — life and death — that predominate more so than any sense of home-seeking. 

“It’s rare to find an artist who is so confident, so comfortable using their own very private experiences as the vehicle for these universalizing aspects of life,” said Robert Mintz, chief curator at the Asian Art Museum. 

When asked if she enjoys teaching, the artist was quick to say she doesn’t — she prefers to have her art do the speaking for her. Perhaps that is part of how she has been able to encode her deepest meaning in her work. 

While Shiota is interested in how objects can carry on memory, she also turns the question inward: “I often question myself, what will remain when my body is gone?”