🧾 DETAILS
Artist: Chiharu Shiota
Year: 2010
Medium: Screenprint with red thread
Dimensions: Image: 28 × 21 cm / Paper: 34 × 27 cm
Category: Contemporary Art
Room: Room 4 — Image, Memory & Identity
🧠 DESCRIPTION
This work consists of a printed image overlaid with dense black thread formations, interrupted by a series of red threads crossing the surface. The composition oscillates between print and intervention, where the underlying image is partially obscured and reconfigured by the thread network.
The red lines introduce a contrasting gesture, cutting through the darker field and establishing a secondary layer of tension.
🔍 SIGNIFICANCE
- Transforms the image into a site of intervention
- Combines print (reproducible image) with unique material gesture
- Explores memory as overlay rather than environment
- Introduces color (red) as emotional and symbolic rupture
- Extends Shiota’s language from installation to two-dimensional surface
✍️ INTERPRETATION
In this work, the image is no longer simply displaced into space—it is interrupted from within.
The printed surface suggests stability, repetition, and reproducibility. Yet this stability is disrupted by the threads:
- black threads accumulate into dense, almost opaque zones,
- red threads cut across the surface like marks of rupture or emphasis.
The image becomes layered:
👉 what is printed
👉 what is added
👉 what is obscured
Memory here does not surround the image—it penetrates it.
The red lines introduce a different register:
- they do not accumulate,
- they intervene.
They function as traces of intensity—moments where meaning is not built gradually, but sharply introduced.
The image is no longer stable.
It is crossed, marked, and unsettled.
🧩 POSITION IN THE COLLECTION
This work occupies a primary position within the collection, where narrative dissolves into spatial and mnemonic structures.
It functions as an anchor, articulating a shift from image to environment.
Within the collection, it is distinguished by its ability to materialize absence and relational memory.
Situated within contemporary installation practices, it transforms narrative into an immersive field.
Memory replaces representation.
📚 PROVENANCE
White Gallery Edition