View of the Opening Ceremony for “Silent Emptiness” at Red Brick Art Museum, 2025.

On March 22, 2025, “Silent Emptiness”, a major solo exhibition by artist Chiharu Shiota was opened at the Red Brick Art Museum. Since 2018, curator Yan Shijie and artist Chiharu Shiota have begun to prepare for the exhibition and it took them several years to accomplish it. Relying on the unique integration of man-made architecture and natural atmosphere of the Red Brick Art Museum, the exhibition features a series of newly created site-specific installations that incorporate Eastern elements and local materials. In response to the core theme of “the presence in absence” in Chiharu Shiota’s creation, “Silent Emptiness” for her can be regarded as “the best one in recent years”.

“This exhibition has realized my plan that was difficult to implement in other art museums, such as covering the main exhibition hall with water and even chiseling huge holes in two walls,” said Chiharu Shiota at the press conference. The particularity of her expression in this exhibition space lies in that it tore through the limitations of traditional exhibition space, allowing the signature “invisibility” in Chiharu Shiota’s work to be imitated through the tangible. Just like her favorite Chinese allusion of “Zhuangzi’s Butterfly Dream”. Chiharu Shiota has realized a dreamy, poetic and intriguing “Butterfly Dream Space” at Red Brick Art Museum.

View of the Opening Ceremony for “Silent Emptiness” at Red Brick Art Museum, 2025.

During the years of preparation for the exhibition, under the influence of global public health events, the new world order overlapped with the old order. Having undergone these dramatic changes, the fragility of human beings became more prominent, and the misfortune of human destiny also triggered Chiharu Shiota’s thinking. “My creation is closely related to my personal experience,” said Chiharu Shiota. Whether it was her unfortunate struggle with cancer after she was diagnosed with it, or her experience of sojourn in Germany, or even the pandemic that swept the whole world in recent years, all of which have deeply strengthened her thinking about “space” and “silence”, and the huge symbolic system she created has silently conveyed her philosophical thoughts with space as her expression.

The exhibition first adopts a linear narrative, using the directional lights in the exhibition hall to lead visitors along the life trajectory of Chiharu Shiota. In the twists and turns of the walls among the exhibition space, they witness the artist’s growth from a girl to an artist with independent artistic thinking and expression. This section also reproduces the representative works by Chiharu Shiota in the form of pictures and texts, allowing visitors to have a vague perception of her creations before they enter into a brand new exhibition space of “Silent Emptiness”.

The Chronology of Chiharu Shiota, 2024, Video, color, sound, 28'50.Manuscripts of Chiharu Shiota, “Silent Emptiness” at Red Brick Art Museum, 2025.Exhibition View of “Silent Emptiness” at Red Brick Art Museum, 2025.

After roaming and reviewing Chiharu Shiota’s past, visitors will enter her current “Butterfly Dream Space”. With her life and artistic journey as the background, Chiharu Shiota fully draws on the unique space and environment of the Red Brick Art Museum, and she looks back at East Asian culture from the perspective of distinctive Eastern philosophy and cross-cultural experiences while taking root in the Chinese soil. She uses local elements nearby and transforms her concept of “Emptiness” into six installations.

Multiple Realities, Chiharu Shiota, 2025, Mixed media, Dimensions variable. Exhibition View of “Silent Emptiness” at Red Brick Art Museum, 2025.Multiple Realities, Chiharu Shiota, 2025, Mixed media, Dimensions variable. Exhibition View of “Silent Emptiness” at Red Brick Art Museum, 2025.Multiple Realities, Chiharu Shiota, 2025, Mixed media, Dimensions variable. Exhibition View of “Silent Emptiness” at Red Brick Art Museum, 2025.

The installation “Multiple Realities” features empty dresses in red and white, symbolizing both a “second skin” and an inquiry into “the dance of the soul after the body gone.” Shiota explains: “Clothing carries memories, emotions, and experiences—it is an extension of the self.” As the large dresses slowly spin in the dark room, their reflections shown in calm water. The movements of the dresses feel like a dance of absence, where the body is gone, but its presence is still felt in the fabric’s motion, echoing Shiota’s concept of “the presence in absence”— “Absence does not signify disappearance but rather an integration into a vaster universe, re-entering the flow of time and forming new connections with all things.”

Gateway to Silence, Chiharu Shiota, 2025, Antique porch, red wool, Dimensions variable. Exhibition View of “Silent Emptiness” at Red Brick Art Museum, 2025.Gateway to Silence, Chiharu Shiota, 2025, Antique porch, red wool, Dimensions variable. Exhibition View of “Silent Emptiness” at Red Brick Art Museum, 2025.Exhibition View of “Silent Emptiness” at Red Brick Art Museum, 2025.

Passing through the dark passage with dim light, one end leads to “Metamorphosis of Consciousness”, the bright and white room is filled with hanging silk ribbons and dots of light, and there is a white bed in the middle, which symbolizes both the starting point and the end of life. The other end leads to “Gateway to Silence” that centers around an ancient large-scale Tibetan Buddhist door, with countless red threads extend from the doorway, tear through the wall, and spread out into the passageway, as if an unseen force is breaking through the limits of physical space to create a passageway that reaches beyond the boundaries of reality.

“Multiple Realities” is connected to “Metamorphosis of Consciousness” and “Gateway to Silence” at both ends, just like the philosophy that an individual’s life gradually diverges upward and then gradually converges. In this exhibition, Chiharu Shiota also relied on the unique advantages of the Red Brick Art Museum to break the original wall of the exhibition space in a pioneering way, so that “Gateway to Silence” is connected with the landscape of Red Brick Art Museum outside the exhibition space. This also conveys the concept that Chiharu Shiota has always implemented in her oeuvre: her creation is closely integrated with life. This combination is not only inspired by life, but it also refers to the artist’s initiative to find ties with the world outside the exhibition through her creation.

Metamorphosis of Consciousness, Chiharu Shiota, 2025, Mixed media, Dimensions variable. Exhibition View of “Silent Emptiness” at Red Brick Art Museum, 2025.Metamorphosis of Consciousness, Chiharu Shiota, 2025, Mixed media, Dimensions variable. Exhibition View of “Silent Emptiness” at Red Brick Art Museum, 2025.Exhibition View of “Silent Emptiness” at Red Brick Art Museum, 2025.

Chiharu Shiota’s creations focus on transforming her unique life experiences into group feelings. While making good use of the exhibition space, she also pays attention to revealing to the audience the original background that triggered her creations, just as her work “Metamorphosis of Consciousness”, which she particularly values is not only her self-interpretation of the inward-looking contemplation of Eastern culture, but also a dialogue across time and space with her own philosophical thoughts on “Zhuangzi’s Butterfly Dream” and the relationship between reality and illusion when she was 14 years old. The art space in front of us does not represent the whole of Chiharu Shiota’s artistic expression, but a wedge that breaks the limits of physical space and inspires viewers to re-examine the world in the interweaving and divergence of the future and memory.

Rooted Memories, Chiharu Shiota, 2025, Red rope, boat, earth, Dimensions variable. Exhibition View of “Silent Emptiness” at Red Brick Art Museum, 2025.Rooted Memories, Chiharu Shiota, 2025, Red rope, boat, earth, Dimensions variable. Exhibition View of “Silent Emptiness” at Red Brick Art Museum, 2025.

In “Rooted Memory” and “Echoes of Time”, the use of local elements also shows that Chiharu Shiota’s art is not untouchable like a “sky garden”, but it can take root in any soil with the migration of the artistic soul. “Echoes of Time” gives “time” a tangible form with three uncrafted rocks from China, and it perceives the eternal traces of nature in the intricate veins; the boat selected for “Rooted Memory” is presented in the exhibition space with mud, and the tree growing tenaciously on the bow reminds people of the poem that “a thousand sails pass by the side of the sunken boat, and thousands of trees bloom in front of the dead tree”, just like Chiharu Shiota’s art is not rootless duckweed.

Echoes of Time, Chiharu Shiota, 2025, Black yarn, rock, Dimensions variable. Exhibition View of “Silent Emptiness” at Red Brick Art Museum, 2025.Echoes of Time, Chiharu Shiota, 2025, Black yarn, rock, Dimensions variable. Exhibition View of “Silent Emptiness” at Red Brick Art Museum, 2025.Echoes of Time, Chiharu Shiota, 2025, Black yarn, rock, Dimensions variable. Exhibition View of “Silent Emptiness” at Red Brick Art Museum, 2025.Exhibition View of “Silent Emptiness” at Red Brick Art Museum, 2025.

Chiharu Shiota’s iconic “red lines” are still present in large numbers in this exhibition. The red lines are like the causes and effects entangled in different physical images and spiritual spaces. They are also like a direct metaphor for the blood vessels. Identity, memory and emotion are inherited and they flow like blood and tie down an individual’s life, constituting “the presence in absence” that Chiharu Shiota has always attached importance to in her artistic creation. In these artworks, the most frequently absent thing is often the “body”. While spectators are in the “spiritual space” created by Chiharu Shiota, it seems that they are endowed with a certain perspective ability, and they can understand the language of mind transcending the objective limitations of time, space and body.

Connections in Ashes, Chiharu Shiota, 2025, Mixed media, Dimensions variable. Exhibition View of “Silent Emptiness” at Red Brick Art Museum, 2025.Text (CN) by Kong Lingda, edited (EN) by Sue/CAFA ART INFO.

About the Exhibition

Curator: Yan Shijie

Artist: Chiharu Shiota

Opening: March 22, 2025

Dates: March 23 – August 31, 2025

Venue: Red Brick Art Museum

Image Courtesy of the Artist and Red Brick Art Museum.