My friend Mirka Knaster, a member of Fiber Dimensions, a group of highly talented fiber artists in the Bay Area has a blog focused on art, specifically fiber. In this post she writes about the Chiharu Shiota exhibit currently at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.
Mirka writes: Yarn installations are Shiota’s way of “painting” three-dimensionally, outside of a canvas. The thread functions the way a line does in a painting. Strands of red yarn are connective webs that resemble blood vessels or neurons in the brain. In Diary, papers and photographs are embedded in the web. Shiota says: “When the body is gone, the objects which surrounded them [sic] remain behind….As I wander the stalls of the markets in Berlin, I find especially personal items like photographs, old passports and… diaries. Once, I found a diary from 1946, which was an intimate insight into the person’s life and experiences. While [I am] looking at those [handwritten] pages, their inner self is revealed, and I can feel their presence.” This installation reflects on the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II through lingering traces of history in the objects Shiota finds and in the absence of the humans who once had them.
Check out her post: https://www.mirkaart.com/blog/2026/7/14/symbolic-red
It’s only on view at the Asian Art Museum until July 27. https://asianart.org
Here is Shiota’s website: https://www.chiharu-shiota.com/top
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