ZHONG CHENG

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

    State of Being : Keys (Red)

    2015

    Metal Frame, Keys, Red Thread
    35 x 60 x 60 cm

    Signed C-S. in English

    Estimate TWD 4,200,000-7,500,000
    USD 135,500-241,900
    HKD 0-0

    Hammer Price TWD 4,200,000
    USD 130,800
    HKD 1,029,412

With a certificate of authenticity from BLAIN SOUTHERN gallery

Provenance：Blain Southern, Berling, Germany

Illustrated：

Exhibition：

Exposition：

Born in 1972 in Osaka, Japan, Chiharu Shiota once recalled in an interview, “Before I learned to write, I was already drawing.” That’s a sign of innate fixation and obsession for creation. Chiharu majored in oil painting in Kyoto Seika University. Her experience as an exchange student in Australia was an eye opener for her, renewing her ideas about art creation and even prompting her to study and develop her career overseas.  

After graduating from university, Chiharu went to study in Germany. Currently based in Berlin, she has been an active presence in various international biennials, art museums, and galleries. Notably she was also a student of Marina Abramovic, the 'godmother of performance art'. In 2021, her solo exhibition in Taipei Fine Arts Museum, The Soul Trembles, showcased a collection of her soul-searching, early-period photography and video works. The exhibition reveals Chiharu’s attempts at turning her musing over issues into art expression and merging performance art into installations with added catalysis, in addition to drawing on performance art as her creation cornerstone.    

Since her early works, Chiharu’s creative focus has revolved around human existence, the relationship between objects and the absence of form, the roots of memory and consciousness. Examples include the 1994 performance installation, Becoming painting, for which she dressed herself in a canvas and splashed red pigments onto herself; and In Silence, the 2002 large-scale installation, in which a burned piano and a wooden chair were enveloped by a web of black yarn.

In the prime of her youth with deep yearnings to explore, Chiharu was however diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2005. Despite her fear about death, being warmly accompanied by her family, and all the contemplation over meanings in life, she felt as if being forcibly propelled to deeper epiphanies. Chiharu with her born delicate sensitivity did not fall into bewilderment and frustration. Instead, she had her sensitive perception further stretched and magnified in the face of life and death challenges, intertwining and meandering emotions, silence and memory. Subsequently the cancer experience was processed for new approaches to creation exploration. After that, everyday objects that symbolize humans in drifting vessels, e.g., shoes, dresses, children’s toys, suitcases, prosthetics, and other means of sustenance, often appear in her installations, in which she wrapped, snared and sprawled the objects with yarn and thread that could easily tangle and snap.    

People are all aware of what sustenance these daily objects mean to them, and yet they could not see the traces of existence, identity reaction and intangible emotions derived from these objects. 

State of Being: Keys (Red) is precisely a case in point, a work themed on assorted keys gleaned from all over the world, reflecting the two major functions that humans have in a social construct: locking and unlocking. However, as to where the key is from, every key has its own narrative. Likewise, some keys are used for a specific space, some others for properties. A key is a protection and provides security at times, or spells occupation at others.  

The keys may look homogeneous, and people may individually feel only their keys are special, but each key comes with its own origin and spiritual solace. Chiharu wraps, pulls, and partially entangles red yarn all over the keys and evenly distributes the horizontal and vertical goings and comings of the red yarn as a metaphor for the anxiety and hysteria of the life issues that Chiharu contemplates over. 

Essentially this work is an attempt at proving that humans and their object-based spiritual solace are multilayered and cumbersome, and when they are closely intertwined in an objective space, there will be no telling where “one end of the yarn” has come from and where it is heading. From the visual perspectives of dots, lines and dimensions, the work has turned into a new mass, an opaque embodiment of the communication routes for crisscrossing objective memories. It shows the presence of human spirits being congealed. It serves as a co-constructed gigantic consciousness placed on an infinite loop. What remains are the nameless keys, ready to once again unlock a certain mystery. Chiharu Shiota was once quoted as saying, “That’s the evidence and destiny of human existence.”

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