Performance and installation artist Chiharu Shiota is best known for her monumental works, which consist of vast, dense webs of colorful threads suspended from the ceiling, often enveloping household items and other objects below. A survey of her work since the 1990s, The Soul Trembles (2019), at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, was her most comprehensive exhibition. Virginia Lung Wai-ki, co-founder of Hong Kong interior design studio One Plus Partnership, explains how it changed her life.

The works with the red and black lines (made of yarn) are her most striking and two of them really impressed me. In the black one with the burnt piano, she describes a childhood memory: when she was a student, she witnessed her neighbor’s house burn down. She saw a piano burning – the crackling, the smoke – and that really inspired her. When I saw it, I could really feel her emotions. The black lines are not smoke, but they give a good impression of what it was like. I only recently realized that she is not much older than me – when I saw the burnt piano, I thought it must have been something that happened a long time ago. She can describe her feelings accurately. It was quite sad.

In the other picture, she had a lot of luggage with red lines. It was about when she had to move from Tokyo to Germany. She wanted to move, but she also wanted to stay in her own country. It was another sad thing: to me, it seemed like you want to travel to many places and you have your luggage ready, but you’re not really sure if you should go. It expressed her feelings: she doesn’t know where she’s going. When I was there, the situation in Hong Kong wasn’t so stable – and when I saw the luggage, I felt the same.

We incorporated a lot of our interpretation of each city into the stores. For the Beijing store, I incorporated two royal parks into my designs: I drew them, then cut them into squares one by one, and then glued them onto fabric and a wall. You can see the garden, but not like in a traditional painting. In Shanghai, the store is in the 1000 Trees shopping center and we used a nature theme with local plants and also traditional Shanghainese crafts.

This is a more personal artistic approach than what I’ve done before – we haven’t incorporated any hand-drawn elements into our work before. We’ve won a lot of awards for it.