Born in 1972 in Osaka, Chiharu Shiota is renowned for her dramatic immersive installation.  She moved to Germany in 1997 to study under the performance art maven Marina Abramovic, which provides a key to her pictorial language that is unmistakably oriented around the artistic solutions of the installation art of the 1970s.

In 2015, she represented Japan Pavilion at the 56th International Art Exhibition of Venice art biennale.   Confronting fundamental human concerns like life and death, Shiota explores questions like “What does it mean to be alive?” and "What is existence?" in large- scale installations.

Personal experience is central to Shiota's work.  She clambers around in the skeins of our unconsci...