chiharu shiota suspends butterfly wings over warm bed at beijing's red brick art museum

Chiharu Shiota’s major exhibition at red brick art museum

Chiharu Shiota unveils Silent Emptiness, a major solo exhibition at Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing, running until August 31st, 2025. Curated by Yan Shijie, the show marks a significant milestone in Shiota’s career, presenting newly commissioned site-specific installations, infused with Eastern philosophy, personal memory, and spiritual reflection. Responding to the museum’s architecture, where Chinese garden aesthetics meet Western order, Shiota transforms the space into a web of introspection, with emptiness transforming into a charged field of presence, connecting the threads of life, death, and time.

Shiota’s cross-cultural lens is on full display in Metamorphosis of Consciousness, inspired by Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi’s dream of becoming a butterfly. Here, delicate butterfly wings and fairy lights are suspended over a bed radiating with phantom warmth. ‘While each time we slip into sleep, it is a rehearsal for death—a journey beyond the body,’ the artist reflects. Emptiness becomes liberation, the moment between inhale and exhale, between form and formlessness.

Metamorphosis of Consciousness at Red Brick Museum | image by Sunhi Mang, courtesy of Chiharu Shiota

Fiber as self weaving identity through absence

Across the exhibition, fiber becomes the conduit for Shiota’s ongoing search for self, translating identity, loss, and rebirth into tactile language. In conversation with curator Yan Shijie, the Japanese-born artist describes her experience of displacement using the metaphor of salt crystallization. Invisible in Japan, her identity became distinct only after relocating to Berlin. The residue of memory, like salt, crystallizes through absence.

At the heart of the Red Brick Art Museum’s exhibition is Gateway to Silence, where a towering Tibetan Buddhist door anchors an eruption of red threads that slice through walls and spill into the gallery. The threads, Chiharu Shiota’s signature material, embody karma, rupture, and spiritual continuity. Each filament becomes a question stretched across dimensions. How do we move through the world when the body disappears, but memory remains?

Thread, in Shiota’s world, also charts time’s invisible currents. In Echoes of Time, three rough stones erupt with wave-like black thread structures that sweep across the gallery like constellations. Rooted in Eastern cosmology, these ancient rocks serve as vessels of memory, monuments to erosion, transformation, and the slow breathing of the Earth.

In Rooted Memory, a salvaged wooden fishing boat from Xingtai bears a tree sprouting from its cracked hull. Red ropes pour from the canopy like rainfall, reconnecting the cycle: boat becomes tree, origin meets return. The installation functions as a meditation on nature’s reclamation, human ephemerality, and the poetic logic of material decay.

inspired by Zhuangzi’s dream of becoming a butterfly | image by Sunhi Mang, courtesy of Chiharu Shiota

archival work completes Silent Emptiness

Shiota also presents Multiple Realities, where empty dresses turn quietly above dark water, their mirrored reflections evoking a spectral duet. These garments, extensions of the self, dance in silence, questioning what remains when the body is gone. For Shiota, absence is not disappearance, but ‘a re-entry into the flow of time, forming new connections with all things.’

Manuscripts, video works, and archival material that trace Shiota’s evolution from early performance art in Japan to international recognition accompany the installations. Bathroom (1999) and Wall (2010) confront displacement and bodily boundaries through acts of cleansing, confinement, and the intimate violence of red thread, cutting, wrapping, and binding.

Silent Emptiness feels like walking through someone’s faded memories made of thread, dust, and worn objects coming together to show how even what’s gone still holds us.

delicate butterfly wings and fairy lights are suspended over a bed | image courtesy of Red Brick Art Museum

emptiness becomes liberation | image courtesy of Red Brick Art Museum

Gateway to Silence | image courtesy of Red Brick Art Museum

a towering Tibetan Buddhist door anchors an eruption of red threads | image courtesy of Red Brick Art Museum

in Echoes of Time, three stones erupt with black thread structures | image courtesy of Red Brick Art Museum

these ancient rocks serve as vessels of memory | image courtesy of Red Brick Art Museum

Rooted Memory | image courtesy of Red Brick Art Museum

a wooden fishing boat bears a tree sprouting from its cracked hull | image courtesy of Red Brick Art Museum

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monuments to erosion and transformation | image courtesy of Red Brick Art Museum

the garments dance in silence | image courtesy of Red Brick Art Museum

red threads slice through walls and spill into the gallery | image courtesy of Red Brick Art Museum

the artist's signature material embodies karma | image courtesy of Red Brick Art Museum

the show is on view until August 31st, 2025 | image by Sunhi Mang, courtesy of Chiharu Shiota

project info:

name: Silent Emptiness

artist: Chiharu Shiota | @chiharushiota

location: Red Brick Art Museum | @redbrickartmuseum, Beijing, China

curator: Yan Shijie

dates: March 23rd – August 31st, 2025