Weng Contemporary – Chiharu Shiota, “I HOPE…” lamp, 2021

The Berlin-based, Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota is best known for creating immersive thread installations that surround the public like a mental space. The former student of Marina Abramovic, explores and confronts fundamental human concerns such as life death and relationship, by manifesting her emotions and interior battles, truths and memories that are at once personal and collective. Shiota’s oeuvre is very intimate yet also universal. During the Covid-19 pandemic the world has experienced innumerable complications and the word “hope” is something that we all became familiar with. Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota sought to create a space that would remind and inspire us to believe again. For her exhibition at Berlin’s König Galerie, she created an immersive installation titled I hope… The piece subsumes 10,000 letters that were sent to her from people around the globe, sharing their hopes for the future. The correspondence was then interconnected by hundreds of various lengths of scarlet thread hanging suspended in the air. I Hope… 2021 is inspired by the lamp designed by a German industrial designer Ingo Mauer.

“ If you have no inspiration, there is no future. I gave people red paper so they could write their hopes for the future, and then I could fill the gallery with this hope… My theme is existence in the absence. This means, no one is there, but I feel like someone is present. So, when someone dies, I can feel their existence. I want to create this feeling with my installation… I am weaving the memory into existence. „

—Chiharu Shiota