Com­mon thread: Chi­haru Shiota’s instal­la­tion art exam­ines life’s big ques­tions. As such, she’s not expect­ing any answers soon.

Who could have guessed that the lit­tle girl who first engaged with art by cut­ting out ­pic­tures of famous paint­ings in the news­pa­pers her par­ents bought would end up a ground­break­ing artist in her own right?

Shio­ta was born in Osa­ka to a com­fort­ably off fam­i­ly. Her father’s busi­ness was man­u­fac­tur­ing card­board fish box­es and she had two broth­ers. None of them were par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in art. ​“I didn’t like the fac­to­ry sys­tem of work­ing with machines, like a machine,” she says. ​“Which is prob­a­bly why I want­ed to ­become an artist. I want­ed to live in a more ­humane way, to seek out some­thing that would sat­is­fy me in a spir­i­tu­al sense.

Art first cap­tured her atten­tion when she was already a teenag­er. ​“There was an image of an art­work in the news­pa­per every Sun­day. I col­lect­ed them and glued them into an album, which became my trea­sure. It was main­ly paint­ing, clas­si­cal or impres­sion­ist, so I want­ed to be a painter.”

She went on to study art at Seiko Uni­ver­si­ty, which had an exchange pro­gram with the Aust­ralian Nation­al Uni­ver­si­ty. It was in Can­ber­ra that she made her cre­ative break­through. Paint­ing wasn’t work­ing out for her: per­haps it was the freer atmos­phere of Aus­tralian soci­ety, perhaps­ it was just being away from home, but she began to experiment.

It was 1994, and she was already seek­ing a release­ from being trapped in 2‑D. There seemed nowhere to go with paint­ing. She made a kind of what-does-it-mean? per­for­mance piece, called Becom­ing Paint, in which she ­cov­ered her­self in red paint and wrapped her­self in can­vas. A ­fel­low stu­dent pho­tographed the process. It made a last­ing impres­sion — not least because the acrylic paint was poi­so­nous, burned her skin and took months to remove completely.

It was a dra­mat­ic shift from can­vas to body and the lat­ter has remained a con­stant in her work. She was already inter­est­ed in the use of thread as a 3‑D pro­jec­tion of line. In anoth­er work, Accu­mu­la­tion, she used black string and acorns to explore inte­ri­or­i­ty and exte­ri­or­i­ty across the ANU campus.

Shio­ta has trav­elled exten­sive­ly. But her next lengthy over­seas sojourn was in Ger­many study­ing with Mari­na Abramovic, who was ­already a ­famous per­for­mance artist with controversia­l, even dan­ger­ous, works in her catalogue.

With hind­sight, it seems like an ­obvi­ous step to have tak­en, except that it was an acci­dent. She was very inter­est­ed in the work of Pol­ish artist Mag­dale­na Abakanow­icz, who also used fibre in her work, but, between her grasp of ­Euro­pean lan­guages and Latin script, end­ed up apply­ing — and being accept­ed — to study with Abramovic in Braunschweig.

“Mari­na Abramovic broad­ened my under­stand­ing of art,” she says now, and gives an ­exam­ple. ​“We went with a group of stu­dents to France and lived like monks, didn’t eat and speak for a week. These ideas of art were new to me.”

Lat­er she would study at the Uni­ver­si­tat der Kun­ste in Berlin. After she fin­ished study­ing in 2003, she remained in Berlin: it has been her base ever since.

“After the wall fell, it was so full of ener­gy. Many artists came and Berlin became a very ­inter­est­ing place to be,” she says. ​“Today it is changed, but I still like the cre­ative ener­gy and the inter­na­tion­al crowd that lives here.’’

She may have fin­ished study­ing for­mal­ly but con­tin­ues to study the world around her. Teach­ing has remained an inter­est: from 2010 to 2013, she was a vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor at her alma mater, Seiko Uni­ver­si­ty, and in 2011 was a vis­it­ing artist at the ­Cal­i­for­nia Col­lege of the Arts. Despite some detours — more allied explor­ations than a search for the new, like the dress­es that are still explo­rations of the body, albeit ­absent ones — the 15 years since she grad­u­at­ed have been utter­ly focused. ​“It feels like one ­jour­ney to me. I keep com­ing back to the same inter­ests,” she says, adding with some irony: ​“I am ask­ing the big ques­tions, so I don’t think I will man­age to find an answer soon.”

She grew up in a Bud­dhist house­hold but has no reli­gion. It is a hack­neyed con­cept, but her art real­ly is her religion.

“Per­for­mance to me can be also a per­son­al thing,’’ she says. ​“Today I main­ly do it for ­myself, to con­nect my thoughts and my body, to feel myself, almost like a spir­i­tu­al ­exer­cise. When I think of per­for­mance, I do not think of doing some­thing for an audience.”

The lack of reli­gion, the spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, the ­impor­tance of the body, the motifs of life and death, the inter­nal focus: all those motifs run like red threads through her body of work.

It allows her to cross bound­aries that today’s iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics often places out of bounds.

Take her instal­la­tion last year in Berlin’s oldest­ church, St Niko­lai Kirche, which recent­ly has been con­vert­ed into a con­tem­po­rary art space.

Called Lost Words, the work tan­gled thou­sands of sheets of paper torn from Bibles writ­ten in many lan­guages in her sig­na­ture black thread, which filled the nave with webbed ­tun­nels. The piece was com­mis­sioned to mark the 500^th anniver­sary of the Protes­tant Reformation.

“I want­ed to link it to the his­to­ry of Chris­tian­i­ty in Japan,” she told art​net​.com at the time. ​“In the 16^th cen­tu­ry, Por­tuguese Chris­tians came to the island as mis­sion­ar­ies but Chris­tian­i­ty was banned short­ly thereafter. 

“Japan­ese Chris­tians prac­tised their reli­gion in hid­ing. You couldn’t pub­lish the Bible or even own one, so an oral tra­di­tion of the Bible devel­oped in Japan.

“The pas­sages used here were cho­sen by the church, and all per­tain to immi­gra­tion, which is part of the con­cept, as I was think­ing about ­men­tal immi­gra­tion through storytelling”

Migra­tion is anoth­er idea that informs Shiota­’s work: not sur­pris­ing per­haps for such a migra­to­ry bird and one who has fetched up in a coun­try expe­ri­enc­ing increas­ing polit­i­cal ­tur­moil as a result of its gen­er­ous refugee policy.

Yet it is nev­er forced or even obvi­ous. ­With­out the boats in the Venice instal­la­tion, the keys were intend­ed to sym­bol­ise uni­ver­sal ­expe­ri­ences and emo­tions: that every­one carries­ at least their house key, and that key accompanie­s them through all the vicis­si­tudes of life. In many of her dis­cus­sions of the work at the time, she left it there.

Her works, even the large-scale ones, are often ephemer­al, so it is a depar­ture for AGSA to intend to ­incor­po­rate its com­mis­sion into its per­ma­nent col­lec­tion. It may seem sur­pris­ing in these days of smart­phones and Insta­gram, but peo­ple through­out his­to­ry have relied on their mem­o­ry to retain the art they have seen — and Shiota’s works are cer­tain­ly mem­o­rable. They tend to imprint them­selves on the retina.

The rea­son most of the instal­la­tions are short-lived, she says, are most­ly logis­tic. Yet she doesn’t expe­ri­ence them as ephemer­al. ​“Peo­ple tell me how they remem­ber my instal­la­tions, so I feel all of them still exist in the minds of the ­vis­i­tors,” she says.

Her instal­la­tion in Mel­bourne will deal with books and communication.

In Ade­laide, she ­returns to the body; in fact, the show will be titled Embod­ied. ​“I will have an instal­la­tion with body parts, deal­ing with the idea of us humans being a bro­ken or defec­tive body and the dif­fi­cul­ties we have of grasp­ing that.” It sounds grue­some, yet Shiota’s work is so lumi­nous­ly beau­ti­ful, even while it is com­plex and ethe­re­al and end­less­ly ques­tion­ing, that what­ev­er its theme it is bound to remain com­fort­ably in our col­lec­tive memory.

Chi­haru Shio­ta: New Works will be at the Anna Schwartz Gallery in Mel­bourne from Thurs­day to August 11. The Cross­ing will be at the Mel­bourne Art Fair, August 2 to 5. Chi­haru Shio­ta: Embod­ied will be at the Art Gallery of South Aus­tralia in Ade­laide from August 24 to Octo­ber 28.