The World Is Yours | Chiharu Shiota
Chiharu Shiota
February 1, 2025 – January 11, 2026
The first thing we look for in an artist for our annual exhibitions is someone with a strong, easy chemistry with this place who shares our faith in cross-cultural pollination. The function of art we favor is its ability to create illuminating experiences of difference that allow us to step outside ourselves in ways that broaden our perspectives and diversify our options. Second, we want someone whose work has aesthetic conviction, emotional depth, and rich intellectual content—all aimed at our humanity. Chiharu Shiota (born Japan, 1972) answers to all of these imperatives. Her immersive installations are among the most compelling to encourage the exploration and universalization of our experiences in contemporary art. The World Is Yours is a metaphysical equivalent to shining a flashlight through your hand under the covers in the dark and thinking, Ah, so that’s what I’m really made of.
Shiota is especially concerned with the invisible matrix of relationships and forces to which each of us belongs and is subject. Because our emotional and psychic connections are the lifeblood and circulatory system of everything that is meaningful in our existence. Of all the ties that bind, it’s those invisible ones that are the strongest. Chains are nothing compared to love—which is not only stronger than gravity, but not even subject to it. While gravity is so powerful that it not only makes it impossible to fall off a spherical planet, it holds the whole universe together. Just compare the power the idea of home has over us to that of any one assemblage of walls and appliances. The same logic applies to our identities, which, being immaterial black-box constructs, are mysterious, and therefore more ineluctable and worthy of examination. The question that Shiota posed to the kids who participated in our programs over the last year, If you were president of the world, what would you change?, is a Rorschach test that reveals an x-ray-like portrait of the soul. Ah, so that’s what I care about. That is a lot of imaginative responsibility to put on a kid from Rio Grande, Oaxaca, and that is the point. Act like your convictions matter, it says, because they do.
Shiota’s installations often include symbolic commonplace items such as keys, desks, and clothes that are near universal in their ability to evoke similar memories anywhere on Earth. Here, in addition to the kids’ answers—installed in exuberant flights of handwritten sheets of copy paper—is a meandering flotilla of four disused fishing boats (pangas) from the area. Together they suggest great distances and the possibility of connecting across them; wishes in bottles thrown into the ocean and washed up on distant shores; the tenuousness of our journeys and the ways we collectivize our fragility, as well as our hopes and dreams. The World Is Yours, it turns out, is a rather uncertain Fantastic Voyage (1966) into the body of our collective unconscious on a mission of discovery and repair. And our human flotilla, Shiota suggests, could use better leadership and improved navigation: more youthful optimism and empowered conscientiousness. We should also be more aware—another of those invisible connections—of what we’re leaving in our wake. Some part of the bow wave of an open boat plying the coast of Mexico eventually touches the shores of Japan. My fears can make you less safe; your dreams may set me free.
What might butterfly effects, rippling out from the hearts and minds of the children of coastal Oaxaca and joining in exponential sincerity with the waves of compassion emanating from Shiota’s many exhibitions around the world, achieve if we were just a little more open to them?
Dakin Hart
Curator
Artist’s Statement
For the exhibition I wanted to build a shared space. Beautiful Fundación Casa Wabi located on the Pacific Ocean is the perfect place to invite local communities to share their visions of our world and to create a new one. Together with Casa Wabi, I wanted to give local communities an opportunity to voice their ideas of our world and their wishes about how it should be if they could make the rules. I especially wanted children to share their thoughts either in pictures or words which are included in the installation. Giving children the time and space to explore their imagination and to create worlds which seem impossible is a necessity for their brain development. These moments of exploration of possibilities help them to strengthen social skills and independence. While children have to follow many rules all day, only in play and imagination can they create the rules and space of their own. I am curious how they would create the world around them if they had the opportunity to share their wishes and dreams.
With my artwork I want to highlight individual experiences in life, so we can discover the many ways we are connected. In the past, I have asked local communities to share their experiences of life, love, thankfulness and their hopes for the future. I have also been inspired to ask children what was before they came into this earth, what they are thankful for, and for their thoughts on death. I have always been amazed by their answers. Their ideas are usually enlightened and pure. I think children often understand the world more than we assume. Here, I wanted people to share what they would change if they were the president of the world. While some want to eat candy all day or don’t want to do their homework, many have much more to say about the way we live. There are no limits on what they imagine.
The World is Yours creates strong emotions in the viewer, which is exactly what I enjoy. I want people getting involved and becoming part of the artwork. My installations allow me to create my own worlds, where I can focus on different human conditions such as life and death and everything in-between. The red thread symbolizes connection and relationships. While we all live different lives, art can bring us together to share the same space.
While it seems that everyone sits in their own boat, pushed in one direction or another by the rules of the world, family, religion, and nationality, we experience the same emotions in life of love, gratitude, happiness, and grief. Life pushes us all in one direction, like the current of the ocean. We travel in the same direction. While the currents take us, the boat carries our dreams and hopes for the future. Our life is a journey with an unclear destination. We are ready to go, but we don’t know exactly where to. The exhibition explores these endless possibilities.
In the end, what is important is what we leave behind. While my installations are often destroyed after the exhibition, they live on in the memory of the viewer. And while the material is usually thrown away, I have been inspired by my visit to Casa Wabi to use the remaining ropes to upcycle into Japanese slippers. Giving my art a new purpose.
Chiharu Shiota
Shiota is especially concerned with the invisible matrix of relationships and forces to which each of us belongs and is subject. Because our emotional and psychic connections are the lifeblood and circulatory system of everything that is meaningful in our existence. Of all the ties that bind, it’s those invisible ones that are the strongest. Chains are nothing compared to love—which is not only stronger than gravity, but not even subject to it. While gravity is so powerful that it not only makes it impossible to fall off a spherical planet, it holds the whole universe together. Just compare the power the idea of home has over us to that of any one assemblage of walls and appliances. The same logic applies to our identities, which, being immaterial black-box constructs, are mysterious, and therefore more ineluctable and worthy of examination. The question that Shiota posed to the kids who participated in our programs over the last year, If you were president of the world, what would you change?, is a Rorschach test that reveals an x-ray-like portrait of the soul. Ah, so that’s what I care about. That is a lot of imaginative responsibility to put on a kid from Rio Grande, Oaxaca, and that is the point. Act like your convictions matter, it says, because they do.
Shiota’s installations often include symbolic commonplace items such as keys, desks, and clothes that are near universal in their ability to evoke similar memories anywhere on Earth. Here, in addition to the kids’ answers—installed in exuberant flights of handwritten sheets of copy paper—is a meandering flotilla of four disused fishing boats (pangas) from the area. Together they suggest great distances and the possibility of connecting across them; wishes in bottles thrown into the ocean and washed up on distant shores; the tenuousness of our journeys and the ways we collectivize our fragility, as well as our hopes and dreams. The World Is Yours, it turns out, is a rather uncertain Fantastic Voyage (1966) into the body of our collective unconscious on a mission of discovery and repair. And our human flotilla, Shiota suggests, could use better leadership and improved navigation: more youthful optimism and empowered conscientiousness. We should also be more aware—another of those invisible connections—of what we’re leaving in our wake. Some part of the bow wave of an open boat plying the coast of Mexico eventually touches the shores of Japan. My fears can make you less safe; your dreams may set me free.
What might butterfly effects, rippling out from the hearts and minds of the children of coastal Oaxaca and joining in exponential sincerity with the waves of compassion emanating from Shiota’s many exhibitions around the world, achieve if we were just a little more open to them?
Dakin Hart
Curator
Artist’s Statement
For the exhibition I wanted to build a shared space. Beautiful Fundación Casa Wabi located on the Pacific Ocean is the perfect place to invite local communities to share their visions of our world and to create a new one. Together with Casa Wabi, I wanted to give local communities an opportunity to voice their ideas of our world and their wishes about how it should be if they could make the rules. I especially wanted children to share their thoughts either in pictures or words which are included in the installation. Giving children the time and space to explore their imagination and to create worlds which seem impossible is a necessity for their brain development. These moments of exploration of possibilities help them to strengthen social skills and independence. While children have to follow many rules all day, only in play and imagination can they create the rules and space of their own. I am curious how they would create the world around them if they had the opportunity to share their wishes and dreams.
With my artwork I want to highlight individual experiences in life, so we can discover the many ways we are connected. In the past, I have asked local communities to share their experiences of life, love, thankfulness and their hopes for the future. I have also been inspired to ask children what was before they came into this earth, what they are thankful for, and for their thoughts on death. I have always been amazed by their answers. Their ideas are usually enlightened and pure. I think children often understand the world more than we assume. Here, I wanted people to share what they would change if they were the president of the world. While some want to eat candy all day or don’t want to do their homework, many have much more to say about the way we live. There are no limits on what they imagine.
The World is Yours creates strong emotions in the viewer, which is exactly what I enjoy. I want people getting involved and becoming part of the artwork. My installations allow me to create my own worlds, where I can focus on different human conditions such as life and death and everything in-between. The red thread symbolizes connection and relationships. While we all live different lives, art can bring us together to share the same space.
While it seems that everyone sits in their own boat, pushed in one direction or another by the rules of the world, family, religion, and nationality, we experience the same emotions in life of love, gratitude, happiness, and grief. Life pushes us all in one direction, like the current of the ocean. We travel in the same direction. While the currents take us, the boat carries our dreams and hopes for the future. Our life is a journey with an unclear destination. We are ready to go, but we don’t know exactly where to. The exhibition explores these endless possibilities.
In the end, what is important is what we leave behind. While my installations are often destroyed after the exhibition, they live on in the memory of the viewer. And while the material is usually thrown away, I have been inspired by my visit to Casa Wabi to use the remaining ropes to upcycle into Japanese slippers. Giving my art a new purpose.
Chiharu Shiota