BRUSSELS.- Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota inaugurated the new Galerie Templon exhibition space in Brussels with a spectacular site-specific installation. Playing with scale and the venue’s architectural lines, the artist transforms the gallery space for her first solo show in Brussels.

Chiharu Shiota’s work combines performance, body art and installations. A student of Marina Abramovic in Hamburg during the 1990s, she places her body at the heart of her sculptural process. Her artistic language was influenced by pioneering artists Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse and Ana Mendieta, both in terms of physical experimentation and focus on the unconscious, and in the choice of delicate materials traditionally associated with femininity, such as fabrics, threads and dresses. Starting in 1996 with her series of installations made with black yarn, Chiharu Shiota transformed her art into an extension of her—absent—body.

Chiharu Shiota is an artist whose profile has risen rapidly in recent years. Her delicate works are freighted with intense emotion, leading the viewer into a solidified world that evokes the themes of absence and memory.!Shiota weaves vast environments in tangled black threads, within which various evocative objects appear to float: musical instruments, dolls’ dresses, shoes, beds. Her graphic networks explore psychic imbrications, interpersonal connections. Shiota has written that “the threads are woven together. They become entangled. They tear. They unravel. They are like a mirror of the emotions.” She will be showing her drawings for the first time at the Galerie Templon in Brussels. These are works whose delicate pencil lines echo the threads of yarn, gentle lines that evoke sculptural volumes as well as the artist’s self-image.

Born in the Japanese city of Osaka in 1972, Chiharu Shiota has lived and worked in Berlin since 1997. She studied at the Berlin University of Fine Arts then the Hamburg University of Fine Arts, and worked at Rebecca Horn's studio. Chiharu Shiota has performed and exhibited extensively, including at Brittany's Domaine de Kerguéhennec in 1997, the Kunstmuseum in Bonn in 2000, Lille's Eglise Sainte Madeline in 2004, Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie in 2006 and Osaka's National Museum of Art in 2008. In 2011, as part of the Venice Biennial, Shiota exhibited Memory of Books at the Gervasuti Foundation. She also designed the sets for the opera Matsukaze, directed by Sasha Waltz and performed in Brussels at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie and in Berlin at the Staatsoper. The same year saw her inaugurate the Espaces de la Sucrière in Lyon with Labyrinth of Memory. In 2013, Shiota showed her installation In Silence at Art Unlimited in Basel, Switzerland. An exhibition of her work opens this autumn at the Mattress Factory museum in Pittsburgh USA (12 September 2013 – 31 July 2014).