How a Japanese installation artist’s monumental work changed a Hong Kong interior designer’s life

Performance and installation artist Chiharu Shiota is best known for works of huge, dense webs of brightly coloured thread, shown at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum and beyond

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Accumulation – Searching for the Destination (2014-2016), by Chiharu Shiota. Photo: Eugene Lee

Published: 5:15pm, 12 Aug 2024

Performance and installation artist Chiharu Shiota is best known for her monumental works consisting of huge, dense webs of brightly coloured thread that have been suspended from ceilings, often enveloping household items and other objects below them. A survey of her work since the 1990s, The Soul Trembles (2019), at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, represented her most comprehensive exhibition. Virginia Lung Wai-ki, co-founder of Hong Kong interior design studio One Plus Partnership, explains how it changed her life.

Virginia Lung, co-founder of interior design studio One Plus Partnership. Photo: Courtesy of Virginia Lung

I’d seen her work before this but I hadn’t seen it in person. I got the chance a couple of years ago, when I was in Tokyo for work.

The works with the red and black lines (of yarn) are her most impressive and two had a big effect on me. In the black one with a burnt piano, she is describing a childhood memory: how she saw as a student her neighbour’s home being burned. She saw a piano burning – the crackling noises, the smoke – and it really inspired her. When I saw it, I really felt her emotion. The black lines are not smoke but they give you a good impression of how it was. I only recently realised that she is not much older than me – when I saw the burnt piano, I thought it must have been something that happened a long time ago. She can totally describe her feelings. It was pretty sad.

In the other one, she had a lot of luggage with red lines. It was about when she had to move from Tokyo to Germany. She wanted to move but she also wanted to stay in her own country. It was another sad thing: for me, it seemed like when you want to go to a lot of places and you have your luggage ready, but you’re not really sure if you should go. It expressed her feelings: she doesn’t know where she’s going. When I was there, the situation wasn’t so stable in Hong Kong – and when I saw the luggage, I felt the same way.

A close-up of the art installation, In Silence, at “Shiota Chiharu: The Soul Trembles”. The exhibition is showcased at the newly opened Shenzhen Art Museum. Berlin-based artist Shiota Chiharu is famous for using and large-scale installations of red and black threads to express memories, anxiety, dreams, silence and more. Photo: Eugene Lee

Since seeing it, I’ve put a lot more of my hand-drawn work into my designs. There were two projects we did for Chow Tai Fook, one in Beijing and one in Shanghai.

We put a lot of our interpretation of each city into the shops. For the Beijing shop, I put two royal parks into my designs: I drew them, then cut them separately into squares, then put them onto fabric and onto a wall. You can see the garden but not like in a traditional painting. In Shanghai, the shop is in the 1000 Trees mall and we used a natural theme, with local plants and also traditional Shanghai handicrafts.

This is a more personal art approach than what I’ve done before – we previously didn’t put hand-drawn elements into our work. We’ve won a lot of awards for it.