Curated by Mami Kataoka, director of the Mori Art Museum, who conceived the original idea for the exhibition, and Davide Quadrio, director of MAO, with curatorial assistance from Anna Musini and Francesca Filisetti. this major monographic exhibition of the Japanese artist’s is a wide-ranging, complex, expressively powerful exhibition that traces back over all of Shiota’s production, through drawings, photographs, sculptures and some of her most famous environmental and monumental installations.
Shiota Chiharu, Accumulation – Searching for the Destination – 2014/2025 – Photo © Giorgio Perottino, courtesy of MAO Museo d’Arte Orientale
The exhibition engages with all areas of MAO, transforming them in unprecedented ways, from the area reserved for temporary exhibitions to the permanent collection galleries, placing it in direct dialogue with the museum’s works. In addition to a series of drawings, sculptures, photographs and installations, the exhibition also includes site-specific works and pieces made specially by the artist for the occasion. Often inspired by personal experiences, Chiharu Shiota’s works explore the intangible – memories, emotions, dream-like images and visions, offering silent spaces for contemplation – and raise questions about universal and existential concepts like identity, the relationship with the Other and life and death.
Shiota Chiharu, Reflection of Space and Time, 2018 – Photo © Giorgio Perottino, courtesy of MAO Museo d’Arte Orientale
Crossing temporal and spatial boundaries, her works deal with the most intimate, vulnerable part of the human being. Her most famous installations create monumental structures, enveloping the spaces where they are installed, transforming them and leading the visitor through an immersive experience in which fascination alternates with anxiety, movement with stasis.
Shiota Chiharu, In Silence, 2002/2025 – Photo © Giorgio Perottino, courtesy of MAO Museo d’Arte Orientale
Until 28 June 2026
