Now on view at Beijing’s Red Brick Art Museum through August 31st, 2025, Silent Emptiness presents a profound new chapter in the work of Chiharu Shiota. The Berlin-based Japanese artist, celebrated worldwide for her immersive environments, uses this exhibition to reflect on absence not as void, but as potential—an invisible force that connects memory, body, and spirit.
Curated by Yan Shijie, the show features a powerful selection of Chiharu Shiota installations, including site-specific works, early video pieces, and rare archival material. As always, her signature red and black threads function like memory itself: tangled, delicate, yet deeply binding. The exhibition leads visitors through a labyrinth of forms that suggest a spiritual choreography between time, space, and identity.
At the heart of the show is Gateway to Silence, where red yarn bursts from the museum’s walls, cloaking a monumental Buddhist door. The threads act as lifelines—threads of karma that anchor the present moment to both past and future. It’s a visceral embodiment of Chiharu Shiota’s enduring interest in impermanence and transformation.
In Metamorphosis of Consciousness, inspired by the Daoist butterfly dream, butterfly wings float above empty beds, hinting at the fragile boundaries between life and dream. For Chiharu Shiota, installations like these question not only what it means to remember, but also what it means to be.
A more grounded yet equally poetic moment appears in Rooted Memory, where a tree grows from the hull of a weathered fishing boat, its limbs trailing threads like rain. Here, decay becomes a metaphor for regeneration, a concept often explored in Chiharu Shiota installations over the past two decades.
What makes Silent Emptiness especially compelling is its autobiographical undertone. The use of worn objects—suitcases, keys, diaries—mirrors Chiharu Shiota’s own experience of cultural displacement. Born in Japan and based in Germany, she once said her sense of self solidified “like salt after the water evaporates.” That crystallization—of memory, of loss, of identity—is central to this exhibition.
To better understand her vision, we invite you to read our Chiharu Shiota interview, where the artist opens up about her relationship with impermanence, her artistic evolution, and why the intangible can be the most powerful medium of all.
Photography and video courtesy of RED BRICK ART MUSEUM