The string theory: Inside Chiharu Shiota’s Threads of Life Exhibition

3 Rooms, 6 displays: Chiharu Shiota brings Southbank Centre through her personal journey using string.

According to East Asian mythology, we are all attached to an invisible red string. Connected to the person we are destined to meet, it may tangle and stretch around the people we cross paths with, and create intimate connections to, but it will never break, because, as the belief says, it is our souls that it is tied to.

Berlin-Based Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota brings an adaptation of this theory to life at the heart of London’s biggest art centre, where she interweaves her noted art form of web-like installations, which overlap and transform eerie, blank white walls into a network of deep meaning and emotion.

At Hayward Gallery, the Threads of Life exhibition brings this symbolic imagery of human experience, memory and connection into the ‘’existence in the absence’’, immersing visitors and taking them through connected rooms that resemble a different part of Shiota’s interpretation of fragility, memory and mortality. All the rooms are designed differently yet hold one thing in common, which is thread, encapsulated in these beautiful webs that leap across the space.

‘’She uses everyday objects and repurposes them in rather [a] wonderful way so that the audience can sort of have an understanding of what she’s doing,’’ Moloney Stevenson, a representative of the Hayward Gallery, speaks on how Shiota intermingles her human condition into interactive and visual art, ‘’But then there’s slightly strange immersive spaces that she creates which make us think about everyday things: our relationship to each other, love, death, everything in between.’’

One room in particular, Letters of Thanks, was covered in sentimental thank-you letters, hanging from the ceiling and carving out a walkway, where Shiota invited contributors to share their own thank you to their close relationships. For Shiota herself, she reveals in her label that this part of the exhibition reflects her relationship with her parents, to say thank you to her father for his hard work and dedication to his family.

Supervising and watching people react to the art, Moloney emphasises the difference in impact with immersive art,  ‘’Any artwork that you’re actually part of, that you move through, is always very impactful rather than just standing outside it, I think if we’re inside something then we definitely have to have a reaction to it.’’

Moving through the exhibition, the red string finishes, and visitors enter During sleep, a room which surrounds white-framed beds with black threads, to which, on certain days, performers become part of the installation, and sleep in the beds.

‘’The work was actually designed with people having been in the bed, and then to get out to leave their human imprint on the bed.’’

‘’Having people in the beds changes it quite dramatically and people become more worried about approaching. It’s also very beautiful to watch people being asleep.’’

So, I guess the invisible string theory must be true; the exhibition is a physical portrayal of our interconnectedness. As Shiota says, ‘’Like threads, human relationships can be tight, loose, dense, cut or knotted.’’ and she perfectly presents this in Southbank’s heart of culture.