ZHONG CHENG

  • Zhong Cheng 2022 Autumn Auction「Modern And Contemporary Art」
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    CHIHARU SHIOTA ( b.1972 )

    State of Being (Brushes)

    2018

    Metal Frame, Red Thread, Artist\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\'s Brushes
    30 x 50 x 50 cm

    Signed C-S. in English

    Estimate TWD 1,200,000-1,500,000
    USD 38,700-48,400
    HKD 0-0

    Hammer Price TWD 3,000,000
    USD 93,429
    HKD 735,294

With a certificate of authenticity from Mimmo Scognamiglio Artecontemporanea

Provenance：Mimmo Scognamiglio Artecontemporanea, Milan, Italy

Illustrated：

Exhibition：

Exposition：

Over the years, Chiharu Shiota has sought to explore the presence in absence, which is also an artistic question that the artist expects the audience to contemplate and answer. This may be because she spent years battling cancer and found herself still clinging tenaciously to life even when she came face to face with death. This experience has taught her what life is all about, helped her to see human existence and its physical evidence, and realized that rebirth happens after death. 

Being raised in a traditional patriarchal family, with her father as head of the household, Chiharu Shiota developed a way of thinking that was modest and conservative. After enrolled in an undergraduate art program, she was given the opportunity to learn about European conceptual artists and performance art. Intrigued by the endless possibilities offered by contemporary art, she came to realize she accumulated many unspoken thoughts hidden deep within her and that these ideas can mature to an astounding extent. In 1994, she created her first performance art piece titled Becoming Painting, as she used her own body as the canvas and colored it with red pigments from head to toe. While studying in Germany, she continued to create and explore other performance art pieces that focused on the human form. These performance art pieces came in a variety of form, including film making. She created a film in 1999 titled Bathroom, and later progressed to installations, stage design, and even well-known public art installation titled The Key in the Hand, it was first showcased at the Japan Pavilion for the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. The exhibition covered floor to ceiling with webs of red cotton threads. With a total of 50,000 keys and two boats, this installation was created to convey complex psychological experience, like the instability and trembling agitation of the soul, through a tapestry of webs that mirrored the anxiety and complexity of human relationships in modern societies, thereby resonating with numerous spectators that visited the show. This immediately brought her to fame on the international art scene. 

Black and red cotton threads, household items, and travel carriers—all of these things have become the most identifiable arts materials and the unique artistic vocabulary of Chiharu Shiota. As she once almost crossed the boundary of life and death, she has learned to closely observe human existence and memories, how life events come and go, while fragile yet easily tangled cotton threads are used to simulate flowing blood streams. In so doing, the artist successfully builds a relationship between objects and human spirituality, thereby demonstrating the fleeting nature of human existence, which is connected through social collectivities and breaking points, thus exemplifying the familiar but strange, indescribable evidence to her viewers. 

Take the artwork titled State of Being (Brushes) as an example. Chiharu Shiota used brushes, a relatively less common item, as the object to be densely tangled by red cotton threads, and as such, serves as an artistic symbol. Brushes are most commonly used in artworks throughout the recorded art history. Numerous artists have used paint brushes to create their art pieces over the past several centuries. It is no overstatement to say that brushes have transferred an enormous load of artistic thought and energy while providing feedback to artists who use them to paint artworks at the same time. 

Chiharu Shiota once described a dream that she had had: “I saw in the dream myself as a ‘painting,’ and I thought about ways to move my body within the painting so as to become a distinguished artwork. As my body was covered with oil paints, I found it difficult to breathe. On that night, I became a part of my artwork. Shortly afterwards, I started to create Becoming Painting.” Looking at this work after these years, it seemed to reflect that in Chiharu Shiota’s pursuit of art, paint brushes help to create space between her and artwork as she needs to use a brush to get her body moved in a painting. Meanwhile. many more life stories that the artist wanted to share with the world were archived, transferred, and intervened, posing the constraints of uncertainty to an extent that the artist found it very difficult to breathe. This has led to a sense of unrest that arises from confrontation between the artist and paint brushes over the years, even though the brush metaphorically serves as one of the “organs” of the artist’s body and helps to maintain the functioning of the artist and the artwork—two entities that are familiar with each other but stay lonely, nevertheless. From Becoming Painting to State of Being (Brushes), she has been transformed from a “painting” to a “paint brush,” suggesting that Chiharu Shiota has learned to use her body to think. That is, becoming a paint brush allows her to more directly capture sensations and initiate a conversation with the paint brush from a new position. Again, the intricately woven tapestry of red cotton threads is created to be an unending web that looks like bright blood spilling and splatting everywhere, which is covered with ambiguous shades that metaphorically mean the artist’s spirituality and body organ, which may seem strange yet inseparable at the same time.

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