Sailing in the air with Chiharu Shiota

With the exhibition “Where are we going?” Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota walks in the footsteps of the highly regarded Ai Wei Wei for an artistic carte blanche at Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche. Entirely made of white thread – the only constraint brought by Le Bon Marché because of its “white month” – suspended in the air, some 150 boat silhouettes, almost like sketches, were created in the artist’s Berlin studio, then brought to Paris.

Considering life as “a journey without destination”, this artist born in 1972 questions by threads and meshes the links that unite beings to each other, to their identity, to their own journey, whether it be displacement or inner path. Using the wire as a brush stroke in space, she draws from the adaptability and properties of her favourite material an additional evocation of her subject. As for her weaving performances, they are a form of dance that refer to her beginnings turned towards performance and body expression.

If the empty boat woven with red threads at the end of which hung a multitude of keys made its mark at the Venice Biennale in 2015, it is a kind of new departure to which the Japanese artist invited the connoisseurs who came in large numbers to the Parisian department store this Sunday evening to discover his monumental installation around the escalators, as well as the windows that Chiharu Shiota and his team of 10 people wove for two weeks before the opening. And like an echo to its flying skiffs above the waves, the wave “Memory of the Ocean” (on the ground floor) invites visitors, famous, collectors or admirers, to let themselves be carried away by Chiharu Shiota’s stitched white thread poetry.

“Where are we going?
Chiharu Shiota
Until February 18, 2017
Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche