Chiharu Shiota’s Threads of Life Compressed a Venice Biennale Pavilion Into One Locked Room at the Hayward

ART & CULTURE · LONDON

Reading time: 9 min

In 2015, Chiharu Shiota filled the Japan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale with more than fifty thousand keys, suspended from two boats inside a sea of red thread. Eleven years later, Threads of Life brought the same vocabulary of keys and thread into a single room at the Hayward Gallery, her first solo exhibition in a London public gallery, tested this time at the scale of one locked door rather than a national pavilion.

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Introduction

Chiharu Shiota: Threads of Life ran at the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, from 17 February to 3 May 2026, paired across the building’s two levels with Yin Xiuzhen: Heart to Heart. It was curated by Yung Ma, the gallery’s senior curator, and it marked Shiota’s first solo exhibition inside a London public gallery, a notable gap for an artist who had represented Japan at the Venice Biennale more than a decade earlier and shown at the Grand Palais in Paris the previous year.

The exhibition took its title from its central installation: a room in which red woollen thread descends from the ceiling and down the walls, threading through hundreds of tarnished keys and a pair of wooden doors suspended mid-air. Visitors moved through it rather than around it, the thread dense enough in places to blur the doors behind it into silhouette. Ma has described the effect of Shiota’s work generally as “organic matter travelling across space and time,” and the title room is where that description is easiest to feel: the keys carry other people’s histories into a space built specifically to hold them.

A thread with a name

Shiota’s red thread is not an abstract material choice. It carries a specific cultural reference, Un mei no Akai Ito, the Japanese belief in a red thread of fate connecting people destined to meet, a thread that can stretch, tangle or loosen but never fully breaks. Shiota has described the idea as something closer to a description of ordinary life than a folk tale: “If you live in a society, you have to be connected with someone, it’s unavoidable,” she has said. “I just wanted to show the connection; I wanted to make it visible.” Black and white threads carry their own registers in the same system, black for the cosmos and what remains unknown, white for the body’s absence, but red is the thread Shiota returns to most often, and the one visitors met first at both the Venice Pavilion and the Hayward’s title room.

Reviewers responded to the physical effect of that thread directly. The exhibition drew a five-star review from Time Out, which priced entry at £19, and was separately called “mindblowing” by Londonist and described by ArtsHub as “immersive art with tensile integrity,” language that points at the same quality Ma has spoken about: a material dense enough to disorient a visitor’s sense of the room’s actual edges.

The room that started as a national pavilion

Shiota’s key installations did not begin at the Hayward. In 2015, she represented Japan at the 56th Venice Biennale with The Key in the Hand, filling the Japanese Pavilion with more than fifty thousand keys suspended above two weathered wooden boats, the whole structure wrapped in a canopy of red yarn. The keys came from donors across the world, gathered specifically for the pavilion, and Shiota described the premise plainly at the time: “Keys are familiar and very valuable things that protect important people and spaces in our lives. They also inspire us to open the door to unknown worlds.” Combining donated keys with her own memories and, eventually, the memories of Biennale visitors themselves was, in her words, “a chance to communicate in a new way and better understand each other’s feelings.”

The title room at the Hayward works from the same material vocabulary, red thread and keys, but at a different order of scale. Where the Venice Pavilion held a national delegation’s worth of donated keys across an entire building, the Hayward’s version runs to hundreds rather than tens of thousands, concentrated into a single room with two doors instead of two boats. It reads less like a restaging of the Venice installation than a chamber version of its argument, testing whether the same idea, that ordinary keys carry other people’s histories, holds at the scale of a doorway rather than a pavilion. None of the exhibition’s reviews published so far set the two installations against each other directly, which is a curious omission given how closely one explains the other.

Ten hospital beds, and the entry Ma built before them

Ma’s curatorial decision for Threads of Life was not to open with the largest room. Visitors first encountered Wall, a 2010 video work in which Shiota, wrapped in plastic tubing carrying red fluid, performs against the sound of a recorded fetal heartbeat, a smaller and more contained piece than anything that follows it. Ma has explained the choice as a deliberate one: beginning with an intimate, single-channel work rather than a room-filling installation, so that the scale of what comes later registers as an escalation rather than an opening statement.

What follows escalates specifically into During Sleep, a work Shiota has restaged in different forms since the early 2000s and rebuilt for the Hayward as ten steel-framed hospital beds enclosed within a web of black thread, occasionally occupied by sleeping performers across the run. Black, in Shiota’s own colour logic, sits alongside red and white as one of three recurring tones across her work, each carrying a distinct register: red for blood and the body, black for the cosmos and the unknown, white for purity and, more often in her recent work, absence. During Sleep is the black room; the title installation is the red one. Reading the two side by side is closer to how Ma has built the show than either room is on its own.

A room built letter by letter since 2013

Letters of Thanks began in 2013 at the Kochi Museum of Art in Japan, where Shiota first invited visitors to write short notes of gratitude for the installation to carry. It has grown with every restaging since: the Hayward’s version suspends roughly ten thousand letters from cascades of red thread, drawn from contributions gathered in Japan, Brazil, Austria, Germany and Denmark, with a new set collected from UK visitors added for this exhibition specifically. Unlike the key installations, which rely on objects donated once and then fixed in place, Letters of Thanks is a work that keeps accepting new material with every venue it visits, which makes the Hayward’s UK contribution a genuine addition to the piece’s own history rather than a display of something already finished elsewhere.

Thread as a second skin

Clothing recurs across Shiota’s work almost as often as thread does, most directly in State of Being (Dress), a 2025 piece in which a dress is bound inside a fine wire outline of its own shape, and in the white gowns, frequently styled as wedding dresses, that appear throughout her wider body of work. Shiota has spoken of garments as a kind of second skin, carrying the trace of a body’s presence after the body itself is gone, a reading that made her the natural pairing for Yin Xiuzhen, whose own practice, one level below at the Hayward, builds sculptural forms directly from donated used clothing. Ma has framed the two artists as addressing “overlapping concerns” from “very different directions”: Shiota renders absence through thread and suspended objects, Xiuzhen through the literal accumulation of other people’s worn garments into cities, hearts and vehicles built from fabric. Neither artist’s room explains the other, but shown together, each sharpens what the other is doing with the same basic material, cloth carrying the memory of a body that has moved on from it.

Shiota’s other major work in the show, a series of roughly 460 small drawings combining wax pastel, ink and stitched red thread, made between 2023 and 2024 to accompany the serialisation of the writer Yoko Tawada‘s novel Praktikantin (The Trainee), extends the same thread vocabulary onto paper rather than into a room, evidence that the material is a working method for Shiota rather than a single signature gesture reserved for installation scale.

From a fish-box factory in Osaka to Berlin, by way of a dream

Shiota was born in Osaka in 1972, the daughter of parents who ran a small factory producing wooden fish boxes, turning out around a thousand of them a day. She trained first as a painter at Kyoto Seika University, then as an exchange student at the Canberra School of Art in 1993, before moving to Germany to study at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig and later at the Universität der Künste in Berlin, where her teachers included the sculptor Rebecca Horn and, decisively, Marina Abramović. Shiota has described abandoning painting after a recurring dream in which she entered directly into one of her own canvases, an experience she has credited with pushing her out of two dimensions and into the built, walk-through spaces that have defined her work since.

She settled in Berlin in 1996 and has lived there for thirty years, though she has said the move itself left a lasting mark on her working method: during her first three years in Germany she relocated nine times, and has described waking disoriented in each new room, unsure for a moment where she was. That disorientation, and a later period marked by a miscarriage, her father’s death three months afterward, and a diagnosis of ovarian cancer, runs underneath the recurring imagery in her work of beds, doors and thresholds far more directly than any single wall text at the Hayward stated outright. Shiota debuted internationally at the Yokohama Triennale in 2001 with Memory of Skin, and by the time she represented Japan at Venice in 2015, the vocabulary she had built from painting, performance and personal loss was already fully formed. Threads of Life is what that vocabulary looks like brought into a British public gallery for the first time.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

Threads of Life closed at the Hayward on 3 May 2026 having done something more specific than introduce Chiharu Shiota to a London audience for the first time. It took a body of work built, in its most famous instance, at the scale of a national pavilion, and tested whether the same argument, that ordinary objects carry other people’s histories, still holds when the pavilion becomes one room and fifty thousand keys become a few hundred. Ma’s decision to open the show with a single video work before either the key room or the ten hospital beds of During Sleep meant the escalation was deliberate rather than accidental, built room by room rather than announced at the door. Eleven years after Venice, the keys came home to a much smaller room and lost none of the argument they arrived with.